Japanese CCTV Camera Can Scan 36 Million Faces/Second

An of-course anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the always-fun Infowars.com: "A new camera technology from Hitachi Hokusai Electric can scan days of camera footage instantly, and find any face which has EVER walked past it. Its makers boast that it can scan 36 million faces per second. The technology raises the spectre of governments – or other organisations – being able to 'find' anyone instantly simply using a passport photo or a Facebook profile. The 'trick' is that the camera 'processes' faces as it records, so that all faces which pass in front of it are recorded and stored instantly. Faces are stored as a searchable 'biometric' record, placing the unique mathematical 'faceprint' of anyone who has ever walked past the camera in a database."

Misleading Headline...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The trick is that the camera processes faces as it records, so that all faces which pass in front of it are recorded and stored instantly. Faces are stored as a searchable biometric record"

So basically it search for a record in a sorted list of up to 36 million records in under a second? Not exactly revolutionary...

Re:Misleading Headline...

[yfkar]

I wondered about the headline too. My first thought was that how on Earth could you get 36 million people to fit into one second of footage AND process it in real time. Even the article wasn't very clear about it.

Also:

Faces are stored as a searchable 'biometric' record, storing the unique

It seems that the writer of the article didn't even bother to

Re:The future

[Anonymous Coward]

Ghost In The Shell.

The headline is wrong!!

[jklovanc]

Come on editors do your job. The headline is "Japanese CCTV Camera Can Scan 36 Million Faces/Second". That is not even close to what this system is doing. System does the following;
1. creates a thumbnail picture of the face. How long this takes is not noted.
2. Searches a database for matches. This is where the 36 Million faces/second comes in and is not done by the camera at all.

A better headline would have been "Japanese CCTV Camera Can Search Through 36 Million Faces/Second". That is a much less impressive feat than scanning as it is just a way of encoding a face for faster searches.