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Face Recognition On Mobile Phones 131

Posted by timothy from the no-more-anonymity dept.
gpvillamil writes: "This article describes a collaboration between Motorola, Visionics and Wirehound to build in an automatic mug shot recognition capability into mobile phones. Particularly interesting is how the phones will scan all faces in the field of view, and indicate matches by an instant short message."
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Face Recognition On Mobile Phones More

Face Recognition On Mobile Phones

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  • I can see how this would be useful in limiting the access to your phone in case it gets lost or stolen, but I wonder who will have access to the faces it scans. With them being able to track the location of the phone, and then accessing the faces within its range that have been scanned, this looks like it has the POTENTIAL to be used to keep track of us. I don't know if the protection from having unauthorized use of my phone is worth that to me.... especially since I don't leave my phone where it could be easily stolen.
    • Th earticle says that it's for use by law enforcement agencies, not for private phones.
      -

    • It doesn't take an actual photo of your face and compare it with another, it recognizes patterns, etc.

      http://home.t-online.de/home/Robert.Frischholz/f ac edetection/techniques.htm

      Explains some possibilities better than I
    • Heh, too late... If you have a cell phone, they can already track you. There have even been cases where European telcom's have been required by the government to divulge the location of a cell phone at a certain time within a 6 month period because they keep a database of the whereabouts of every cell phone as long as it's turned on. (That was actually mentioned on a story on slashdot, but it's been a couple of years)

  • Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 27, @08:56AM
    from the no-more-anonymity dept.

    Giving someone your cellphone number and then wanting to remain "anonymous" when they call you strikes me as particularly odd, if not maniacal :-P

    got mono? [monolinux.com]

  • Cool (Score:1)

    by O2n ( 325189 )
    Cool thing if you think the police would really use something like this...
    Makes me frown to think how many so called "security" guards/companies would jump the bandwagon; not to mention all the outlaws.

    Anyone thinking (for the 4th time today) "enemy of the state"?
  • Someone in the database walks down a crowded street, and the police are bombarded with text messages...

  • Biometrics (Score:2, Informative)

    by govtcheez ( 524087 )
    That's good - that means I can wear a hat or sunglasses and the police won't be able to catch me. The current state of biometrics is nowhere near good enough for this anywhere, let alone in cell phones.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Biometrics (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @12:09PM (#3234535) Homepage Journal
      They'd better secure the transmission and storage of this data, because one excellent application for this would be to steal biometrics. The bad guys can then impersonate who they will be either hacking their cell phones to send your biometric, or by even simpler means.

      As an example, the current generation system being deployed in airports can be fooled by a picture which is xeroxed and worn like a mask. I read an account of a demonstration of the technology at an airport where the company's rep put on such an improvised mask with Osama Bin-Laden's face on it -- triggering the alarm of course. My reaction to that was -- this is supposed to make me feel safe?

  • Right to privacy?!? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by itsnotme ( 20905 )
    What the heck? This is an insane idea, its just giving away everybody's right to privacy, if you're in a cafe reading a book and there's a cellphone with this technology.. you just lost your right to privacy when the info is transmitted..

    Remember what happened to that guy who they tested the superbowl mug shot system on? remember the hell he went through? what the hell do you think would happen to YOU if somebody got into the mugshot system and started fuddling with it?!

    I think I'm going ot have to start wearing one of those cell disabling systems on my person to disable any cellphones in a radius that can take my mugshot or whatever other stupid things they put in cellphones!
    • What the heck? This is an insane idea, its just giving away everybody's right to privacy, if you're in a cafe reading a book and there's a cellphone with this technology.. you just lost your right to privacy when the info is transmitted..

      "right to privacy....in an open cafe". That's funny!

      Since when do you have an expectation of privacy sitting in a cafe?

      You give privacy advocates a bad name.

      Tom


      • right to privacy....in an open cafe". That's funny!

        Why is that funny ? I guess it depends on how you define privacy.

        I surely expect some level of privacy when I go to a cafe and have a coffe/beer/whatever. F.ex. I don't expect to find records of what I drank, on the Internet, the next day. And

        Don't forget that 'privacy' is something that is defined by the people, and if you stop beliving you have this right, then you will stop having it.

      • Since when do you have an expectation of privacy sitting in a cafe?

        You have none. However, the poster does have a real point, just bad terminology.

        Obviously you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place: Anyone who happens to look (or point a camera) in your direction can see whatever it is that you're doing. You do have an expectation of some level of anonymity in many public places, however, and that brings with it a sort of privacy. Anyone can see what you're doing, but no one knows who you are.

        But this expectation of anonymity is a very relative thing, and it's also a very *new* thing if you look at all of human history. Even today, residents of very small towns (say, less than a thousand people) have no expectation of anonymity in a public place. Anonymity in public is a phenomenon that arose first in large cities and more recently in very mobile populations.

        Is public anonymity a good thing? Maybe. A necessary thing? Clearly not (I think privacy *is* a necessary thing).

        One way to look at this is just as a continuation of the development of the "global village". That term is usually used to indicate the ease with which people throughout the world can communicate and trade, but one aspect of a real "village" is that no one in it is a complete stranger. Having lived in a very small town, I can tell you that everyone knowing everyone else has both advantages and disadvantages. In a small town, you know who you can trust and who you can't (and there are typically very few of the latter, which is why many people in small towns don't lock their doors). OTOH, it really sucks for the person who does one stupid thing one time and puts themselves into the "can't trust" category.

        All of this presumes that the mobile face recognition technology (or any face recognitiion technology, for that matter) really works, which at present it does not. Current face recognition technology does quite a good job at comparing an image and a template and deciding "is this probably the same person?" Good in the sense that it's fairly difficult to pass yourself off as someone else. However, when you change the problem to matching an image against a database of templates and deciding "Which person, if any, is this one?" then current FR tech is horribly bad. The birthday paradox makes this a really hard problem to scale.

        Given the fact that even humans, with their relatively small databases of a few thousand faces and highly developed recognition abilities, occasionally make mis-identifications, it's by no means certain that computers will ever be able to do this well on a large scale.

        • It occurs to me that not everyone knows what the birthday paradox is:

          For those who aren't familiar with it, the birthday paradox comes from the old party game question "Are there two people in this room with the same birthday?" The naive, commonsense answer would consider that there 366 possible birthdays in a year and expect that out of, say, a group of 30 people there's only a roughly 10% probability that two have the same birthday. That would be a good estimate of the probability of one person in the room having a particular birthday, but the problem is that in the room there are 870 (30*29) different "pairs" of birthdays, and the odds one pairing has the same birthday is quite high (I'm too lazy to calculate it, but it's around 70%).

          In the case of face recognition and other identification technologies, it's like having 300 million people in the room and the problem is how to extract enough information from a face to create a relatively "unique" facial signature, because if there's even a small probability that signatures of two different faces will be the same, you will get *lots* of false pairings. Suppose that there is a 10e-6 probability that a random image will match a random template. In a nation of 300 million that means there will be, on average, 300 other people that, to the computer, look just like you. Worse, if you have a database of, say 1,000 bad guys, and you have an airport with 100,000 people passing through it daily, you'll get an average of 100 false positives *per day*.

          And current FR tech is a long way from the 10e-6 false positive level. More like 10e-3 (meaing in the airport scenario that for every passenger passing through the terminal, the computer will find one possible match in the bad guy database. On average, of course).

    • Umm, do we really *have* a right to privacy? I don't believe it's in the Bill of Rights; it's just one of those things we all expect should be there. People have been arrested and convicted of indecency b/c peeping toms looked in through their windows and saw them having sex in their *own home*.
      • Its not illegal to look through someones window though.

        It would be a violation of your privacy if I tapped your phone line, or entered your property [e.g. backyard].

        What alot of you guys think of as private, eg. in a car, at a bar, etc.. is not at all. If you are not on your own private property by definition you are on someone elses or you are on public property.

        Tom
      • Umm, do we really *have* a right to privacy?

        Well, you might not but I do - under the European Convention on Human Rights, now passed into law in the UK, I have a right to privacy.

        • Must not be a very strong law, considering the amount of public video cameras in the UK. Oh wait, they're for your "protection". Just wait till they have face recognition installed... then the government will know your movements everywhere the moment you step out of your house.
      • "Umm, do we really *have* a right to privacy?"

        Unless you're posting from China, or maybe soon the USA, then you probably live in a democracy. That means your rights will be whatever you, the people define them as. You really want privacy? You want to define privacy? Then get it encoded in your laws ASAP.

        I think the real question isn't if we have the right or not... We can theoretically have any right we vote for, if we want it bad enough. The question that we must answer is exactly how should we define law-enforced privacy? Face-recognition software is bad in public places? They say it's public, so we have no right to privacy. Well, imagine, for a moment, instead of a camera in a public place, you saw a uniformed police officer standing on the sidewalk, or in the cafe, walking around tables, visibly and openly taking a photograph of everyone, or perhaps holding a camcorder.

        We must ask how safe would we feel in this situation.

        There would be far less criminals on the streets. But remember, never piss off the watchers....

        Nothing here to see, move along.
        • Perhaps you want to review your interpritation of the Constitution?

          The US Constitution sets limits on government and enumerates powers of the government. It is not a list of rights and privleges for the people and the States.

          Also note this other post about the Ammendment IX
          http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30123&cid= 3235 177

          We do not have to make a "right to privacy" law, we have already restricted the government from legally invading our privacy. Some of us think that the courts interperit the governmental power of privacy encroachment too liberally (yes, invasion of privacy is a liberal use of governmental power), but the point is that if privacy is not mentioned in the document then it's absance makes it a RIGHT not a privelage.
          • Newsflash: Other countries have constitutions too!

            What makes you think I was interpreting your constitution in the first place? The internet does extend beyond your borders you know... (At least for now.) I only mentioned the USA in passing as an example... I'm not even in the USA, why should I be an expert on your constitution. My post is applicable to any free and democratic country that has a constitution in any form.

            And what it meant, is that privacy is becoming a very important issue, because new technology is becoming capable of erasing privacy in very scary ways, perhaps to the point of threatening freedom and democracy. And I also meant, that people should vote and guarantee privacy in whatever way they can, while they still can. Whether it's enshrining a "right", or adequately restricting their gov't, that doesn't matter. We'll leave constitutional nit-picking to the lawyers.

            It's good you understand your own constitution. Do you think it's enough to protect your country from the future threat this technology brings? I hope so.

            Bork!

            P.S. If the people of the USA really wanted the constitution to become a list of rights and privileges of the people, they could make it so. Not a bad idea, on the face of things...
      • Umm, do we really *have* a right to privacy? I don't believe it's in the Bill of Rights; it's just one of those things we all expect should be there.

        The Ninth Amendment [usconstitution.net]: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

        In layman's terms: "Even though we didn't mention them, you still have them."
    • I think I'm going ot have to start wearing one of those cell disabling systems on my person to disable any cellphones in a radius that can take my mugshot or whatever other stupid things they put in cellphones!

      And what happens when you or someone near you needs urgent medical assistance and there's no landline near by?

      imho phone blockers are antisocial, and a bad, bad idea for lots of reasons

    • What the heck? This is an insane idea, its just giving away everybody's right to privacy, if you're in a cafe reading a book and there's a cellphone with this technology.. you just lost your right to privacy when the info is transmitted..

      In the USA your "right ot privacy" is actually a prohabition on government from snooping on you. There are exceptions too numerous to go into.

      It is NOT a prohabition on citizens (non cops/agents of the government) from looking at others in places of public accomodation, like the hypothetical cafe you mention.

      It is NOT a prohabition on other citizens from writing down your license plate number.

      It is NOT a prohabition on other citizens from recording your picture and selling ot for profit (that is covered under other laws, not 4th Amendment).

      It is NOT a prohabition on your neighbor looking out the open window of his home, into your open window and watching you do whatever you are doing there.

      AND Certainly NOT a prohabition on a citizen from pointing a camera at you and looking up who you are based on your facial features.

      If you had incorperated some element of government ABUSE of your privacy then you would have a valid point.
      • oops! My bad for not reading the article first! The article mentions government use.

        Above points are valid, but not that pertinant to the post they are attached to.

        The real point is you have no expectation of privacy in a public place, as others have pointed out.

        However, there may be something here in the recent Supreme Court ruling about law enforcement using extraordinary technology in an effort to avoid obtaining a warrant that otherwise would be needed. Doubt it, but it is a possibility.
        • It seems that technology does this a lot these days. You take a perfectly normal, legal activity. Apply technology to enhance it. Suddenly, you get something big and scary, that a lot of people become frightened of. Here are some examples.

          1) Copying tapes and sharing them with your friends: More or less legal, under fair use rules. Add technology to the mix, and you have something that could (potentially) ruin an entire industry. (Artists would have to resort to actually performing to earn money! IMHO is a good thing.)

          2) A few cops around the city, looking out for bad guys: This is good. And legal. Add technology to the mix, suddenly you have cheap videocameras on every street corner and public place, hooked up to a central database server. You can't fart without a computer cataloging it and adding it to your file. This seems legal, but is very frightening.

          There are other examples I'm sure, but I'm still too sleepy to think of them.

          To understand why privacy is critical to democracy, think of this analogy. The right to the secret ballot. If you had no right to privacy in the voting booth, people in power will know how you vote, and could then use their power to push you around. Now imagine, that instead of knowing how you voted, powerful people just can call up everything about you, your likes and dislikes, where you go, who you talk to, and your deep personal opinions. All at the push of a button.

          In my opinion, this is just as harmful to democracy as losing the secret ballot. Imagine how easy it would be for Chinese officials to round up people with opposing political views if they had all this future technology.

          With technology in the mix, nobody, nowhere, will have the power to change a bad government system unless we act now to ensure it.
          • Interesting and very valid stuff.

            In refrence to what I was speaking of in the advanced tech realm is (not remembering exactly) what the Supreme Court ruled was that the police can not use thermal/IR imageing, laser tapping windows, etc. without obtaining a warrant, i.e., technology can not be used as a warrant circumvention device.

            Perhaps someone with some refrences will respont and educate us on this.
            • Yes, good point. A collection of small, legal actions, taken as a whole, can be horribly bad. And should be illegal.

              (For the diehard slashdot people) Most, if not all of M$'s actions are perfectly legal. Yet the consensus is that they did something awfully bad and illegal.

              Technology is giving people the opportunity to be good/evil in brand new, innovative ways. The law should be very ready for this... I hope it will be.
    • It's designed to inform the police if there is a known criminal nearby. Isn't it effectively the same as having a policeman walk past and recognise that you are a crook he's looking for, except that he doesn't have to memorise all the "wanted" posters any more, the ARGUS system does it for him? So I don't see how the phone and database impinge on your privacy any more than the wanted poster and the policeman with a good memory for faces.
    • Dude! (itsnotme) I just had to put in my own two cents because of the overwhelming negative response to your post.

      You are NOT on the wrong track. These posters are in every likelihood programmed zombie clones who believe that certain trucks are, 'Like a Rock', 'McDonald's Makes You Smile', and who, 'Just Do It'. --Either that, or they are Cointelpro agents assigned to keeping the bias and percieved popular opinion on Slashdot in the far, far right on sensitive issues. (--Naturally I'm just joking about the agents. Programmed zombie people are more than enough to get the job done.)

      I don't give a hoot about how such morons interpret privacy law. Having my face scanned, databased and tracked by tax funded agencies while I walk through a public area is creepy and fascist. Period.

      It's the "Spirit of the Law", you twits!


      -Fantastic Lad

  • Can you say big brother?
  • ..can't wait to get their hands on this one!

  • Making reservations (Score:3, Funny)

    by morie ( 227571 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @10:07AM (#3234112) Homepage
    Calling a restaurant:
    - Would you have a table at 19:00 ?
    - Yes, but you'd better change into something with a tie, mister!

  • Arrested based on crappy facial recognition. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Marty200 ( 170963 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @10:09AM (#3234124)
    I can just see it. Walking down the street and some cops cell phone mistakes me for a murderer and then next thing I know I'm in jail. The odds are that the software is going to make a mistake, and how do you convince the police that it's not you.
    MG
    • Trivial: to confirm your identity, all the police have to do is look at you.

      Note: the police do this already. Every time one of them walks past you they are scanning your face and checking it against a database of wanted people stored on a device that every policeman carries called a "brain". Indeed, every person has a "brain" buried in their head and the police periodically distribute pictures of suspects to these "brains" via the popular media.

      TJ

      (Yes, I'm being sarcastic, and yes I know there are privacy issues involved, but they are no where near as severe as some people are making out)
      • Why?

        Police are bad, but they're necessary in small doses, because criminals are bad too. Much like chemotherapy is bad for you, but so is cancer.

        Imagine now, your "walking police databases" on every second street corner, watching everyone. Keeping tabs on everyone. Comparing notes. Making files and dossiers on whomever they chose. It worked for the USSR for 80 years. The old method works great for China. Police state works good for Cuba.

        Now imagine if they had this tool. The word Freedom would be a fart in the wind.

        So explain to me why this tool would be good to have in a free democratic country? Explain to me how this would *ONLY* be used to catch criminals and terrorists. I want to know.
  • It willcome to choice. you may or may not want to buy such a phone. Police may buy it if it looks like an ordinary mobile. Then they can scan faces without being obvious. It is same as the police guy carrying a security camera which is not very obvious. Other than that i may or may not want to buy this phone. As for the tracking, face recognition or no face recognition, you can be tracked to your location if you use a cell phone. A cell phone will emit radiowaves and trignometry can easily be used, thats how radio beocons work, so in that respect it wont make much of a difference. The only difference it may make is that it will be harder to steal mobile phones if you prefer to buy it with face recognition, and it also means that your wife may not be anle to borrow your phone!
    • I don't think the real concern is about police using these devices, it's that *everyone* will be, without ever explicitly choosing it. Think about it, how many features now come standard on mobile phones that were once extras? We getting the first wave of phones with embedded digital cameras; that will likely soon be ubiquitous and non-optional on mobiles.

      Once phones all have digital cameras, it's not a terrible leap to think that a law would be passed (perhaps in London to start with where video surveillance in public spaces is routine) that phones with cameras need to have this auto-facial recognition software built-in. That and some sort of positioning technology (GPS or otherwise) is all that's required. You go to a bar, put your phone on the table and it's checking out the riff-raff around for possible matches. find one, silently dial in to some sort of central DB that records the match/location, and voila. The phone's owner is none the wiser. It doesn't even have to be terribly reliable; with this sort of brute force method even a very low successful match percentage would be a win for law enforcement.

      I'm not generally a privacy alarmist, but this is a little scary.

  • How'd this get approved? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Facial recognition doesn't even work with human computers, much less what will fit inside a commodity cell phone. I hope Motorola's stockholders are aware of this & make sure they don't throw more good money after bad.
  • There is allready a company working with this kind of cameras. Here [wespot.com].

  • Sprint PCS guy (Score:5, Funny)

    by mhesseltine ( 541806 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @10:14AM (#3234149) Homepage Journal

    I'm just waiting for the ads showing the PCS guy with one of these phones.

    PCSG:John, tell me what happened.

    John:Well, me and some buddies were out having a guys' night out. We had some drinks. Everything was going pretty good. Then this girl came up to us. She was really HOT!

    PCSG:John, did you go home with her?

    John:(Sheepishly) Yeah.

    PCSG:What happened next?

    John:I woke up in a bathtub full of ice, with a note that said I should call 911, and found out I was missing a kidney!

    PCSG:John, what you really need is this new PCS phone with face recognition technology. You could have identified her and let one of your buddies "jump on the grenade"

    • They will sow a seeds of worry disguised as ridiculous sick humor, so that people will be more willing to accept these attacks on our private lives and public health.

      Ubiquitous face recognition in public places is invasive and fascist. The number of nasty people we need to be 'protected' from is insigificant. But I'm sure somebody will blow up another building or two in order to close the sale of this bullshit.


      -Fantastic Lad

    • Verizon Guy: Can you see me now?...Good.

      Verizon Guy: Can you see me now?...Good.

      Verizon Guy: Can you see me now?...Gooooood.

  • Here's the link to the slashdot story linking to the article about the Tampa superbowl face recognization system victim: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/08/202624 7&mode=thread" ... Now can you imagine what could happen if the cellphone recognization system became widespread? I wonder what the failure rate would be.. probably enough to claim a few victims
  • At first, I reacted to this with an "ewww, creepy! here comes Big Brother again!" but then I wondered what exactly they're planning to use it for. Are they comparing specific mug shots when looking for on-the-run criminals? Or trying to scan areas for potential troublemakers? The one's pretty useful, the other's kinda sketchy, ethically. Either way, they should probably make it clear to buyers that their phones will be used in their capacity, hopefully even be required to get their permission. *snicker* End result, of course, is that we've got one more thing to be paranoid of: "Quick, duck behind that potted palm, here comes somebody with a cell phone!" Instead of merely wanting to strangle the loud cell phone users, we'll be uneasy around them, 'cause they might be spying on us.

  • what about... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SGDarkKnight ( 253157 )
    if i want to grow a moustache, then shave it off, grow a beard a month later, then shave it off, then grow a goatee, and shave it off -- i guess the point im trying to make is, what happens when i want to change my apperance (ever so slight or major) from anything like facial hair, hair colour, pearcings, or anything else that can be done to your face... will it send an alert to athorities each time?

    • Why would you shave off your beard just to grow a goatee? :-P

    • Face recgonition algorithims are not based on hair style, color, etc. They are based off immutable features. A couple of examples are the distance between your eyes or location of your nose in relation.
    • You can change you facial hair, and it will still work, but if you put on sunglasses, you may have a problem.
      It uses the distance yyour eye are from each other, and some positioning information from your nose.

    • Re:what about... (Score:2, Funny)

      by nege ( 263655 )
      Dont worry. After a few isolated cases of murders eluding cell phone distributed policing technology (CPDPT) through facial hair and/or masks, congress (along with the phone companies, cell phone makers, police, and the RIAA and MPAA) will pass laws restricting the growth of facial hair and or sunglasses.
    • Eigenfaces research from the early nineties showed how part of the face can even be missing and it will still pick up the principal components of the face.

      Also, there exists research that synthesizes faces in a vector space. For example, making a face look older or more feminine. If the police suspected you would grow/lose facial hair, they could synthesize what you might look like and put those images into the computer.
  • "Michelle, 12 o'clock. You slept with her, then never returned her calls. Her angry & protective girlfriend is with her."

  • We've had a huge surge in mobile phone crime recently in the UK, so this system could be quite useful.

    It's be somewhat ironic if a criminal led the police to themselves by their own act of theft.

  • at least ppl cant use your phone if they steal it.
    • why not? This is nothing to do with using face recognition for access to the phone, though I imagine that would be a feature. This story is about using a phone as a portable surveilance camera with automatic recognition of "suspects"
      -

  • That will help them... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by AVee ( 557523 )
    ...find Bin Laden. Twice, every hour. I mean, face recognition based on the power of a mobile phone, how accurate can that be?

    I wonder, if this system is ever going to be used, how long it will take before the cops get sick of all the false alarms and drop it again.
    • My sister is already sick of false alarms.

      She has two twin babies, who are identical
      looking (specially, when wearind diapers only.)
      and one of them get fed twice for the same meal,
      and the other left hungary (actualy, the kids crawl
      around, and stick their faces into every bowl, and
      you could never tell who ate, and who just has a dirty
      face.)

  • Surely this is going to have some major implications in terms of bandwidth? How much data would have to be transmitted in order to make a positive identification?

    • i guess it would just come down to a snapshot image to be transmitted, but I can see where your comming from. Unless the cell phone is going to hold the entire mug shot database, then it would need a continous link to where that database is to compare the snapshot with the mug shots. If if the phone is going to contain the mug shot database, then how is it going to be updated whenever new mug shots are added or taken away... ah well.. i guess i'll wait and see what they come up with.
    • It looks like it might just identify "key" points of the face, and produce some sort of 3d "hashcode" The images on the article seem to suggest it might compure some sort of wireframe model of the face, which would be small and quick to send back to the database.
      -

  • how accurate can this stuff be? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether@@@tru7h...org> on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @10:39AM (#3234261) Homepage
    Just to illustrate the problems with this stuff (beyond the well known superbowl incident), browse through this moderatley-related link: flo control [quantumpicture.com]

    Seems like a pretty cool set up, right? Not quite.. start flipping through the timeline archives this guy has saved up (the "flo watch" button). As you click through, note how many times it seems like the cat would be permitted to enter, yet it comes up not letting him through the door. this day [quantumpicture.com] was a particularily bad day for the system. We, as humans, would have positively identified the cat properly. Computers, obviously, can't do that yet with any high accuracy.

    Now granted "law enforcement" versions are going to be a wee bit more sophisticated, but if the cell phone version has even half the errors this cat detector does, are we ever gonna be able to put any faith into this technology?


  • I wish I could say something insightful and profound about this... all I can do is sigh as one more piece of news forces me to face the innevitable future completely lacking in privacy and anonimity. The ONLY way out of it is legislation against it. And post Sept 11, I just don't see that happening. I think it is going to take bold and equally in your face protesting to turn the trend around. Perhaps a lot of people wearing masks on a daily basis when in public.
  • Ill never be able to even get on the road again!

    All we needed were swerving SUV's playing pinball on the interstate with the other cars trying to call mom.
  • I'm not sure what use this would have in cell phone's kinda silly and pointless... But I do see how this would be great for cars, plains, and other vehicles..

    "Hello Charlie, you are not authorized to drive this vehicle at these hours, please contact Bob or Samantha for assistance" Bob and Sam being Mom and Dad... perhaps even automatic radio transmition on detected entry of foreign (No not foreigners...) entry into a plains cock pit. Pilot has 5 minutes to contact ground control to cancel the jets from being scrambled....

    I don't need my cell phone telling me hello every time it recognizes me, it's a tool. Let me use it like one.
  • this seems like a little bit of an overkill if it's primarily for security purposes...to me, a better (in terms of accurarcy) security implementation would be thumbprint identification...instead of having a mini camera scanning your mug (and those around you apparently), you should just be able to touch your thumb to the display screen to unlock the phone and use it...that seems a little more realistic (and less big brother-ish)...

    of course then, we'll have a rash of people having their phones stolen and their thumbs cut off...

  • Visionics... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Znork ( 31774 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @10:46AM (#3234292)
    Is a BS artist company. The products do not work as advertised. The problem isnt in the products tho, it is in the advertising.

    Facial recognition works fine for security checks, where your face gets compared against a small database and the recognition software can be trimmed to rejecting people. The physical settings like lighting can provide the best possible conditions for the software to provide an accurate match, and people can try again if they get rejected.

    It also works fine in finding possible matches for a photo in a database. Now you can trim the software to a high acceptance rate, and get a bunch of likely matches which you can sort manually.

    But it does not work if you need to compare a large database like wanted libraries against a massive number of people because you cannot have it both be certain to trigger on the people it's interested in but not the people it doesnt want. You get a minimum of false positives and negatives which will become most of the triggers when you have a large dataset. A device which will be wrong almost all the time isnt useful.

    Of course, the actual article is rather fuzzy about the use. If it's used for scanning suspects at the site to speed up police work, it will actually be useful. If it's used for scanning everyone the police passes it wont be. And with Visionics being involved in various of the spectacular post 9/11 'facial recognition' projects, I wouldnt be surprised if they attempt to pull another bullshit job.
    • This portion of the Visionics press release [shareholder.com] gives a bit more of a clue (though not much):
      The application, developed specifically for a law enforcement agency, uses Visionics' FaceIt® ARGUS as the delivery platform for facial recognition capabilities and Wirehound's Birddog software on Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2METM) technology-enabled mobile phone with a color display. The FaceIt ARGUS system automatically finds faces in a field of view and searches them against a mug shot database. Upon finding a match, the Birddog component generates a wireless alert to the phones used by mobile law enforcement officials, who are then able to verify the identity of the subject. The phones can store multiple images and are alerted when a new image arrives. Non-matched images are automatically discarded from system.
      Other than buzz-words, it sounds like this is intended to check the identity of suspects who are in a custody situation, instead of just scanning everybody passing by. This could be helpful to police and to innocents, since the 'mothership' sends the mug shot to the phone for human verification of identification. However, I think it might be easier in these situations to use fingerprints, and send the mug-shot to the phone. I guess that the difference is that COTS phones have the cameras to take pictures of faces, while fingerprinting would take special hardware. Presumably, a cruiser could carry a mobile fingerprint device, but it would take $$ to make a mobile version. If they could use COTS to the same effect, it could be a big win.

      I'm pretty skeptical, though, having used a 'FaceIt' trial version. I was able to train it to my face, but only by presenting it with a lot of variations (lighting, angle, etc.). This training data isn't available with mug shots.

      However, I could envision a case where a cop remembers a 'wanted' picture, pulls someone over because they look like the picture, then uses the phone to pull up the right picture for on-the-spot comparison. Might work. But I doubt we're there--yet.

  • Salon has an article about this. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Check out the Salon article [salon.com] about this. This is also a good writeup.
  • The Reg has a good article [theregister.co.uk] on the uses (part of an authentication scheme) and abuses (crowd scans) of face recognition.

    Basically says that the software will deliver way too many false positives in an uncontrolled situation.

  • Dammit! This was one of the reasons I left Motorola 3 years ago - they are just stupid. And this doesn't give me much hope that the stock I bought while I worked there, which is worth 1/3 what it was, is going to go anywhere but down the toilet.

    But knowing what I know about them (I was there 5 years) they most likely didn't have anything to do with creating this software. They are sooooo behind the times there, a technological iceberg. Lots of potential, no action. I am sure they could afford to buy a stake in these small companies with the money they saved from laying off the massive amounts of dead wood they allowed to hang on the corporate teat for years.

    no sour grapes, just REAL glad I left.

  • Is the false positives such a system would give. A false identification would put you in the position of being guilty until proven innocent. But worst of all, such a false positive could give law inforcement the right to search your house... computer... etc. What then if they find a copy of DeCSS, or coppies of copyrighted works for which you don't seem to have the originals or receipts?

    "No he wasn't the guy the system said he was, but as luck would have it he's a cyberterrorist! Lucky we caught him!"

    A system like this is begging to be used as a way of getting around probable cause and illegal search and seizure.
  • What if I forget to turn off my phone before I put it in my pants pocket, will it send out messages telling the police Yul Brynner has come back from the dead?

  • voice recognition more feasible? (Score:3)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @11:07AM (#3234393)
    Since phones are primarily an audio device, wouldn't voice recignition be more feasible? I haven't heard much about voice metrics being used to verify identity, though sound interfaces are easier to install than video.

  • Ummm (Score:1)

    by gregm ( 61553 )
    Hit the cell owner over the head, grab phone, hold phone away from you, apply duct tape, use phone? Am I missing something here?
  • Today's top requirement for mobile phones is still not featurism, it's BATTERY LIFE. Well, after basic telephony, anyway. You need minimum one full day of battery life or you're toast in the market. Usually you need more, at least upwards of a week.

    Now, switch to one of the most processor-intensive task known to man: image recognition for biometrics in a real environment.

    Then, switch back to the low-power, low-capacity processors of mobile phones (reference; they're usually loaded to capacity when codecing radio AND infrared at the same time).

    Are you trying to tell me that THIS guy (pointing at the mobile phone) will run THIS application (pointing at face recognition software) IN THE BACKGROUND, ALL THE TIME?

    I don't know what you're smoking, but you damn well oughta share some.
  • And who is gonna foot the bill to put all this crap into what I hope by the time this is out a god damn tiny cell phone?

    -Adma
  • John: Who are you and how'd you know I had a gall bladder operation?

    You: (glancing at PDA) Um, just sorta heard it.

  • Hmm.. somehow, I doubt the resolution of cameras in cell phones will be anything near that capability.

    Maybe good enough to tell if someone is wearing the smilie face tshirt, but not rapid facial recognition!
  • What if I were to tape a photo to the "eye" of my phone? It would report that Bill Clinton, Sammy Hagar, or even Ted Bundy was using my phone. (Although not necessarily in that order for my preference.)
  • This artical should be from the take-the-electrical-tape-off-the-VCR-and-put-it-on -the-cellphone dept.

    But seriously, I think that the world has too many dolts with video cameras walking around allready. I have a feeling that a system like this would be abused. I assume that the raw data would be sent back to a few central servers in the bacement of the telcos and processed there. What's to prevent them from keeping a record of the matches alond side a time code and of corse the cell site. I see the posibilities of tracking people who might chose not to cary a cellphone specificly to avoid tracking. And yes I relize that there are cameras all over the place allready, but they are not ALL linked together.
  • it's about being lousy with faces.

    I'd pay big dollars for a device that would recognize people I'd met in the past and pull up their contact file. If it was standardized I'd happly attach my facal geometery to my vCard to make it easier.

    If I want to go rob a bank, I'd be planning to wear a mask anyway.
  • I remember a Superbowl where Visionics had a lot of real cameras running.
    But the system didn't work and had a lot of false negative and false positive recognitions. As the logs later showed the operators in effect cut it off after two days.
    So now we want cellphones ringing like bad car alarms. Gees.
  • To all of the oh-my-gosh-I-can't-be-secret-anymore posts:

    Unless you have committed a crime. Why would the fed/police/gov want to track you? I mean the police are overworked as it is, why would they want to track people that they have no reason to be suspicious of?

    I'm refusing to be paranoid until I have a good reason to do so.!
    • "Why would the fed/police/gov want to track you?"
      1. you're sleeping with Sheriff's wife
      2. You espouse nonconformist political views
      3. You're an adherent of an "unrecognized" religion
      4. You "fit the profile"
      5. They're bored, just exhibiting hacker/tracker spirit
      6. Because they can!

      Now ask, "why climb a mountain."

    • Unless you have committed a crime. Why would the fed/police/gov want to track you? I mean the police are overworked as it is, why would they want to track people that they have no reason to be suspicious of?
      Because they're stupid.

      Explain to me why the FBI has files on so many innocent celebrities. Explain to me why they have files on so many civil rights workers. Explain to me why they have files on so many random people.

      I recall the case of a librarian who found out about the Freedom of Information Act. As a lark she wrote to the local FBI office and requested a copy of her file. They wrote back and refused to provide it because she was the subject of an active investigation, but said her file was 12 pages long. HUH? She was an *assistant* *librarian*. Her life was about as interesting as that sounds.

      My uncle works in the defense industry. I stayed with him for a couple of months during the summer when I was 16. My aunt and I used to get followed around shopping malls by ridiculously obvious guys in trenchcoats. We thought it was funny and would just walk into Victoria's Secret and watch them get embarassed and leave, but nevertheless it was a waste of resources: we didn't (and don't) have any access to any sensitive materials, and we were doing very innocent shopping. Someday I will write to the FBI and see if it was indeed them, just out of curiosity.

      I'll trust the feds/police/government to responsibly choose who to investigate/track when hell freezes over.

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