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posted by martyb on Friday December 16 2016, @12:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the false-positives-are-a-bad-thing-said-one-of-the-twins dept.

If you've watched any sort of spy thriller or action film over the last few years – think Jason Bourne or Mission: Impossible – the chances are you've seen facial recognition software in action. These movie scenes often involve an artist's sketch compared to mug shots, or sometimes even a live CCTV stream, and with the clock ticking, a match is usually found for the culprit in the nick of time.

It seems natural then to assume that what happens in the film world is similar to what happens (most of the time) in the real world. We might think that our faces are constantly being tracked and recognised as we walk past security cameras in city centres – but this is not actually the case.

Not only would such a system require millions of cameras capable of producing high-quality footage, but it would also require the integration of photo-ID databases such as mugshots from every police force, previous passport images, and driving license images for everyone in the country.

And yet even if this high level of integration was possible, a far more basic problem still exists – facial recognition systems are still not 100% accurate.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday December 16 2016, @11:14PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday December 16 2016, @11:14PM (#442267)

    Even if the police are 100% honest and competent, faulty fingerprints can still be pretty useful - if there's a million people in the city, there's probably only what, a few thousand who could possibly have left the fingerprints found at the scene? And far fewer where there's a high probability. That gives them one reasonably small set of suspects. If they have any other evidence that can independently generate set of suspects even remotely as small, then a little Venn diagram magic will almost certainly narrow the credible suspect list down to only a handful of people. It's very important to recognize that it's a probabilistic process, and there's no guarantee that your list actually includes the actual perpetrator, but it can still be a huge help in the majority of cases.

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