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U.S. agency: Pandemic masks thwarting face recognition tech:
Having a tough time recognizing your neighbors behind their pandemic masks? Computers are finding it more difficult, too.
A preliminary study published by a U.S. agency on Monday found that even the best commercial facial recognition systems have error rates as high as 50% when trying to identify masked faces.
The mask problem is why Apple earlier this year made it easier for iPhone owners to unlock their phones without Face ID. It could also be thwarting attempts by authorities to identify individual people at Black Lives Matter protests and other gatherings.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology says it is launching an investigation to better understand how facial recognition performs on covered faces. Its preliminary study examined only those algorithms created before the pandemic, but its next step is to look at how accuracy could improve as commercial providers adapt their technology to an era when so many people are wearing masks.
Some companies, including those that work with law enforcement, have tried to tailor their face-scanning algorithms to focus on people's eyes and eyebrows.
NIST, which is a part of the Commerce Department, is working with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security's science office to study the problem.
Aww, I feel so bad for the little guy! Perhaps we can help out by training up a neural net to correlate masked and unmasked photos.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:16PM
It's because it's not evidence that is their concern; they are driven by ideological and/or self-image factors that would be affected if they adopt the factually correct position.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to invent, search for, interpret, favor, and recall information that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values, regardless of its lack of basis in factual matters. The current surge of #fakenews provides rich sources of such bogus information, and here in the USA, a considerable amount of comes from our political leadership, providing a handy opportunity to employ the appeal to authority fallacy, argumentum ad verecundiam.
Divestiture aversion, AKA endowment effect is people's tendency to assign a higher value to things they own and/or have accepted, compared to things they don't own or accept as yet.
Superstition and religion (but I repeat myself) are rife with those who assign high values to myth, and comparatively low values to science and/or logic. In some cases, there is a "my tribe espouses this, therefore I back it" factor. This applies to many types of groups, but is most often outright obvious in cases of adherence to mythology.
When it comes to the scientifically absurd — e.g. flat earth, belief that the sun orbits the earth, [npr.org] "holes to hell", crystal "healing", homeopathic dilution disease treatment strategies, etc. — I assert that in the USA, at least, this can be laid directly at the feet of our inadequate and largely dysfunctional primary educational system.
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Surely not everybody was kung fu fighting?