Google Images + Facial Recognition Find Thief Who Looked Like Woody Harrelson (nbcnewyork.com) 53
"The New York Police Department used a photo of Woody Harrelson in its facial recognition program in an attempt to identify a beer thief who looked like the actor," reports the Associated Press:
Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology highlighted the April 2017 episode in "Garbage In, Garbage Out," a report on what it says are flawed practices in law enforcement's use of facial recognition. The report says security footage of the thief was too pixelated and produced no matches while high-quality images of Harrelson, a three-time Oscar nominee, returned several possible matches and led to one arrest.
The NYPD also used a photo of a New York Knicks player to search its database for a man wanted for a Brooklyn assault, the report said.
"The stakes are too high in criminal investigations to rely on unreliable â" or wrong â" inputs," Georgetown researcher Clare Garvie wrote.... The Georgetown report says facial recognition has helped the NYPD crack about 2,900 cases in more than five years of using the technology.
And in Florida, Vice reports, law enforcement agencies "run roughly 8,000 of these searches per month."
The NYPD also used a photo of a New York Knicks player to search its database for a man wanted for a Brooklyn assault, the report said.
"The stakes are too high in criminal investigations to rely on unreliable â" or wrong â" inputs," Georgetown researcher Clare Garvie wrote.... The Georgetown report says facial recognition has helped the NYPD crack about 2,900 cases in more than five years of using the technology.
And in Florida, Vice reports, law enforcement agencies "run roughly 8,000 of these searches per month."
In a surprise ending (Score:1)
The algorithm flagged Woody Harrleson's father as a criminal.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if anyone here will understand your reference.
For those who don't know, Woody Harrelson's father, Charles Harrelson, was a convicted murderer of a Judge. He was also tried, but never convicted, for multiple murders prior to that. And briefly he was connected to the JFK assassination.
Seems like a great idea to me-- it's an SVM (Score:3)
If you want to find something that matches something else there's two ways you can do this. One way is to invent the "one-true-distance-metric" for what exactly you mean by "matching" for two different photos. Another way is to take a set of example photos that you think all resemble the thing of interest, then pull up all the images that match all of these (not just one of them).
The latter is effectively the same notion behind a support vector machine. You rely on the distance metric or kernel for short range comparisons but you choose new comparison points as you take larger steps in the feature space.
Everyone knows the support vector concept is vastly better than trying to claim these is any one true distance metric. You just can't transfer what you know to the math. But you can learn from trnasferable examples.
Using just a single "woody harrelson" is kind of an extreme case of using just one support vector. It would be better to take all the mug book matches from witnesses then automate finding faces similar to all of those.
THe exception to this (Score:4, Funny)
IF they had tried feeding in Kevin Bacon, we'd all be arrested.
Steve Buscemi (Score:2)
"kinda funny looking in a general sort of way", describes most people generally but steve buscemi precisely
If you look like Steve Buscemi (Score:2)
It's a terrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why there can be no ambiguity in the process. Once it starts you'll have the cops catching the wrong perp and prosecutors throwing them in prison for months on end because they can't risk a jury just not liking the look of them.
True story, I've been on 1 jury in my life and I had a woman say to me with a straight face "We can't allow our feelings to get in the way of our decision and we must get this guy off the streets". Everyone I know has at least 1 story like that. If you're up for a crime you wanna gamble on that?
Re:It's a terrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't need facial recognition to catch the wrong person and force a plea bargain. That has been happening for decades while facial recognition is new.
So our fear of giving the police new tools is based on a problem that has no relationship to those tools. We should start looking at solving the problem.
All tools require responsible users. We do not trust our officers to be responsible users at the moment, and there are a lot of good reasons behind that.
Personally, I believe we need to get off the crime prevention kick and roll things back to the days when police were well-trained, well-paid, predominantly college-educated professional investigators pursuing those who had already committed real crimes.
Not evidence for arrest, cause for a conversation (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why there can be no ambiguity in the process. Once it starts you'll have the cops catching the wrong perp and prosecutors throwing them in prison for months on end because they can't risk a jury just not liking the look of them.
These matches are not evidence for arrest. They are cause to go have a conversation with a person. Just like one person saying so and so and resembles that photo. The computer match is nothing more, so and so resembles that photo, it is not eye witness testimony which is more of the nature "I personally witnessed that person do such and such". Two very different things. Only the witness testimony is evidence, not any claims of resemblance.
Two words (Score:2)
The problem with stuff like this is that in a repressive society every excuse for the cops to show
Re: It's a terrible idea (Score:1)
Wish they caught my friends' beer runs (Score:3)
A) it says "stealing beer", not "a beer". The typical pattern I each guy grabs a case in each hand.
B) I REALLY wish the police had caught my friends when they were doing "beer runs". After getting away with that several times, they decided next time they'd take the cash too. Which is armed robbery. Armed robbery gone wrong is murder, which ended up with a 15 year sentence. I really, really wish the cops and the system had intervened at the "stealing beer" stage, before a young person was murdered.
Re: (Score:2)
You darn better catch those guys, or store owners are going to go back to the old method; a shotgun behind the counter.
Losing a few cases of beer is a big deal, because other young people see these guys with the free beer and want to do it too.
Plus, beer has to be transported on refrigerated trucks, on a schedule. It isn't only a lost sale; if the store ends up running out of some brands of beer, a very real likelihood at a corner store in a big city where there isn't as much storage space, then that loss o
This is what makes it scary. (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of stuff is what make facial recognition really scary: many people look similar. The problem is less with the technology and more with the fact that you can rapidly find yourself in a situation where you have to prove your innocence. The job of the police is not to find who committed a crime, it's to close cases and that can mean arresting a close enough match and passing it to a prosecutor. The prosecutor's job isn't to make sure they are prosecuting the right people or ensure a fair trial, it's to scare people into taking pleabargains and getting convictions.
Far too many people in the legal system are use the out, "I'm just doing my job," and are all too eager to send people to prison because ensuring there is justice is time consuming and therefore costly to the state.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You are completely misunderstanding what happened. The police did NOT stick a picture of Woody Harrelson into a computer, then immediately go arrest the people that cam up as likely matches.
Instead, the criminal was described as looking like Harrelson. However, the police did not have a good image from the security cameras. However, using a picture of Harrelson (this the criminal was described as looking like him) allowed them to ID several people that had similar faces.
The police then investigated those
Police investigate people who resemble photos (Score:2)
This kind of stuff is what make facial recognition really scary: many people look similar. The problem is less with the technology and more with the fact that you can rapidly find yourself in a situation where you have to prove your innocence.
No it is not a matter of proving your innocence. Whether a person or a computer says you resemble the person in the photo the situation is the same, that it is cause for a conversation not evidence against you. Its not like a witness who claims to have directly seen you do something. Its just noting a resemblance. It only gives police people to go have a talk with, to investigate to some degree. That is what the police do, investigate. And being told you resemble someone in a photo is cause for investigatio
Re: (Score:2)
Well no, this is far worse, this is in fact the legal equivalent of swatting. What if they use your image as a nobody and a couple of trigger happy law enforcers empty their magazines into your chest because they were scared of your phone, their defence, that was your photo and you were accused of being armed and dangerous and they felt unsafe. The law enforcers involved should be prosecuted, they have absolutely zero right to place an innocent member of the public at risk and they very much did so. This is
Re: (Score:2)
Looked like middle weight champion (Score:2)
Let's arrest Hurricane.
Re: (Score:2)
Did he jermp into a car with out of state plerts?
Given his past history (Score:2)
Maybe the perp really WAS Woody Harrelson...
Re: (Score:2)
Like cops and coffee.
twist: Woody Harrelson was the guilty one (Score:1)
twist: Woody Harrelson was the guilty one
all input is unreliable (Score:2)
Facial recognition matches the wrong faces. Humans mismatch people more than half the time when trying to match pictures to someone they only saw once. Blood or DNA could be there for other reasons. A fingerprint could be yours and there for reasons other than involvement in a crime. Video is vulnerable to misinterpretation - for example a video of someone trying to save a drowning person would almost always look like they are drowning them because drowning people fight. Etc. etc.
All evidential input to cri
Tag Readers are Prime Examples of this (Score:2, Interesting)
My girlfriend was pulled over because a tag reader came back that her tag was unregistered. When we had the officer re-check it came back unregistered, so we called the DMV the next day... Registered...
This is OCR Text Recognition gone completely Awry and the problem is there is really no way to tell how many of these false positives are really happening!
The cop even issued her a citation for it, which got thrown out, but the cops didn't care that the tag was registered since the tag reader flagged it even
So his arrest warrant says...? (Score:2)
So his arrest and search warrant says he looks like Woody Harrelson, OMGolly.
I find it interesting...
"Among the matches Harrelson’s photo returned, the detectives saw a man they believed was the person on camera,
and they later arrested him for petty larceny — adding to the mounting evidence that police are using facial recognition
technology seemingly however they see fit." https://futurism.com/police-wo [futurism.com]
â (Score:1)
Dangerous (Score:2)
This is a very dangerous development.
Suppose you spend a night reading a book at home on the couch. A few weeks later, the police barge in and charge you with a murder that happened that night. If you have a partner/roommate that will vouch for you being on the couch all night, they don't believe him/her: you guys are partners, they would always backup your alibi even if you were away. Now you're in real trouble.
This could of course always happen, but if they show up, they normally have substantial hints t
Oh, Gibson called another one. (Score:2)