Computers Outperform Humans at Recognizing Faces

seven of five writes "According to the recent Face Recognition Grand Challenge, The match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995. 'Among other advantages, 3-D facial recognition identifies individuals by exploiting distinctive features of a human face's surface--for instance, the curves of the eye sockets, nose, and chin, which are where tissue and bone are most apparent and which don't change over time. Furthermore, Phillips says, "changes in illumination have adversely affected face-recognition performance from still images. But the shape of a face isn't affected by changes in illumination." Hence, 3-D face recognition might even be used in near-dark conditions.'"

Great, now commercialize it..

[QuantumG]

It's really annoying how much of this research never gets turned into product.. or, worse yet, it gets embedded in some proprietary piece of shit hardware instead of being released as a reusable component. I'd love to add some good facial recognition to my pet robot, but I'm not buying your watt sucking camera.

Surveillance soceity.

[Palmyst]

I wonder whether these scientists lose any sleep over how their research advances will contribute to the future of our societies.

Had to say it...

[ectotherm]

I, for one, welcome our face-recognizing overlords...

Re:Surveillance soceity.

[presarioD]

I wonder whether these scientists lose any sleep over how their research advances will contribute to the future of our societies.

If scientists ever paused to think for the possibilities of potential abuse of their intellectual effort, progress as we know it would come to a grinding halt. Back to Neanderthal times...

It relies on the ordinary people to safeguard their societies from degenerating but that is an entire different subject (requires getting off the couch alot), and since I can already see the political-zombies approaching to offer their caned insight into the matter it's time for me to split...

Re:Face the Consequences

[Hex4def6]

Don't be silly.

If this were to be used for criminal identification, I'm sure that when they get a "hit" for a wanted suspect, that they're going to manually sift through the video, in order to figure out direction of travel etc.

These things aren't error proof, and never will be. A jury would also probably be more sawyed by seeing part of the footage than just having a prosecutor say "the computer said it was him."

If I were an (innocent) suspect, I'd much rather that I was tagged by a computer, since the video evidence would be available to criticize, than to be tagged by a witness to a crime, who are notorious for misidentifying people.

So in regards to your hypothetical question, no. At best this would be like a google search for faces, where an investigator would then further analyze the hits.

Re:Surveillance soceity.

[ucblockhead]

Every technology has downsides. This technology clearly has pretty serious upsides. Do you wonder whether the inventors of the integrated circuit lost sleep over the contributions of their work to the surveillance society?

Re:Great, now commercialize it..

[Original Replica]

Yeah facial recognition software has been a US Customs thing for a few years now.

"As U.S. airports begin installing face-recognition systems to thwart terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, civil rights activists are rushing to decry the technology as ineffective and invasive."

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-275313.html [com.com]

"In the USA Patriot Act, the National Institute of Standards (NIST) is mandated to measure the accuracy of biometric technologies. In accordance with this legislation, NIST, in cooperation with other Government agencies, conducted the Face Recognition Vendor Test 2002. FRVT 2002 Sponsors and Supporters are: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Institute of Justice, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Transportation Security Administration, ONDCP Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center, United States Customs Service, Department of Energy, Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Secret Service, Technical Support Working Group, Australian Customs, Canadian Passport Office, United Kingdom Biometric Working Group. "

http://www.frvt.org/FRVT2002/default.htm [frvt.org]

I included the long list of agencies because under Homeland Security they will undoubtably share databases. If you have been scanned, everyone has your facial recognition file and fingerprints. I tried to stand out of the camera view, but there was no good way to aviod walking past it. The customs guy did alot of typing when I came in, probably as it was my first time in front of a facial recognition camera. My girlfriend was practically waved through, but she had been though customs just a year ago, as so probably already has a file.

Re:Surveillance soceity.

[Kuciwalker]

If something is possible it will be done by someone.

Re:Surveillance soceity.

[Thrip]

I think you're letting researchers off the hook too easy. There are a million things to research, yet many people choose to work on projects that have dubious implications for society. I mean, sure, there's a lot of gray area between searching for a cancer cure and weaponizing anthrax, but I see no reason to excuse scientists from at least asking themselves where their work falls on that spectrum, and whether what they're doing is likely to improve or damage our world.

Back to Neanderthal times...

I'm afraid moving forward to Neanderthal times isn't any better. If we have slow down to go in the right direction, so be it.

Re:in other news

[grammar fascist]

Right.

Recognition tasks are almost all inductive in nature, where performance on math is deductive. Human induction pretty well spanks machine induction at most of the things we take for granted - like recognizing and decoding faces, voices, speech, the sound of your walk, etc., etc., etc. The thing computers do least well is infer what bits of information are most important. We seem to excel at that.

Despite what the findings say, I stand by the faces thing. It sounds like the recognition algorithms got high-resolution 3D scans of human faces as input. Wake me when they can do as well as a human with low-resolution 2D scans.

That being said, it's great to see progress in this area. I can't wait until someone has to lop off my head and carry it with them in a plastic bag in order to break into my workplace. It's more grisly than taking a thumb, but much less likely to happen... I think...

Re:in other news

[McFadden]

I concur. Computers can outperform people under experimental conditions where the data provided to the computer is exactly what is required to perform the job at hand. Show me a computer that can recognize a person from a brief glimpse of the the back of their head, when they're walking away, on the other side of the street, and I'll agree they've got us licked on this one.

Time to invest

[Nazlfrag]

I always knew sometime in the future we'd be wearing those 80's wraparound sunglasses everywhere. That or one of those nifty 3-in-1 fake nose, mustache and glasses kits.

Re:Since you asked, you can have it...

[SEE]

google can backup any claim

Yep, it can back up any claim.

For example, dinosaurs co-existed with humans [google.com].

Re:Great, now commercialize it..

[zCyl]

Will somebody please explain to me why every time some new way to do anything that would involve identifying people, it's an invasion of privacy? I mean honestly, why are you so afraid?

The freedom of assembly is what's at stake, and it in turn is essential for a free democracy. If the government can track the movements of innocent people, then it can monitor the organizations and associations (including political) that one is associated with. And if the government has the power to document the members of every rival political movement as it is forming, including all the other activities of the members, then they have the power to intimidate and crush it. (Don't believe me? Find a history book.)

Privacy from the government is a key component of freedom, because it places serious constraints on the government's power over the people. Without this, you can very easily become a subject rather than a free citizen.

Re:Great, now commercialize it..

[T-Bone-T]

Ever heard the term "panopticon"? When you know that someobody could be observing your every move and you don't know exactly when you are being specifically observed, your behavior will change to what you believe the observer wants. Every camera brings us one step closer. I know there is no expectation of privacy in public but I wish it was a person on every corner rather than a camera. What the camera sees has the potential to exist indefinitely, human memories will fade and disappear.

Re:Surveillance soceity.

[maxume]

Name five technologies that you like. I bet I can name dubious implications for no less than 3 of them, especially if you make them different, rather than hiding behind fragrances(which can be used to make food of low nutritional value more attractive, or to shift the moods of shoppers so that they are a bit more spendy) or whatever, and relatively specific(because in general 'a cure for cancer' is a good thing, but not really a technology).

Re:Great, now commercialize it..

[fractoid]

When you know that someobody could be observing your every move and you don't know exactly when you are being specifically observed, your behavior will change to what you believe the observer wants.

Only if the observer has the power to impose their will on you. I can stand on a street corner and say I hate the government as loudly as I want, and I don't care if they have a camera watching me. The moment they get the power to lock me up for saying I hate them is the moment that the freedom goes away, not when they put the camera up.

I read an interesting piece on two different types of surveillance society a while back. The first one had state/police cameras recording everything and everywhere, and became a totalitarian state. The second had the same cameras everywhere but they were publicly accessible. The result was that, while any public action was viewable to everyone, the accountability was applied to everyone as well. The Man could watch The People, but The People could watch The Man too. The basic theme was that we're going to end up with a surveillance society anyway, and that full public access to the surveillance net is the only way to stop it from being used by a corrupt government. (I can't remember where I read it, could be Marshall Brain's page but I can't get there from work. Anyone recognize the sound of it?)

Re:Not that impressive

[Kjella]

If "better" is based on the standards of humans (fastest good enough guess) rather than machines (as correct as possible, complete & in depth), humans win.

Translation: Throw enough hardware at it, and the machines win? Whatever a computer has been successfully programmed to do, it's usually bloody fast at it. It sounds like a well parallelizable task that should scale easily for many years to come.

Hmmm...

[Slayer]

Because that's not what face recognition software was made for. When people watched John Cleese, they knew they watched a celebrity and they also knew that not too many celebrities would dress up like this and do the silly walk. Only using all this extra information made people recognize John Cleese. Chances are that even in a small town you'd find quite a few people who, if dressed up and walking like that, would easily pass as "John Cleese". On the other side most actors/models would not be recognized by anyone reliably if they don't have their make up and if lighting differs from the studio where they usually have their pictures taken.

Face recognition software on the other side doesn't make those assumptions but instead focusses on identifying people from a large population of registered images, using no extra knowledge and making no assumptions. All the face recognition vendor test says is if you put up 1000000 random faces, people would misidentify more of these faces as John Cleese than modern algorithms would.

Re:in other news

[CastrTroy]

The problem becomes how do you "flash" an image at a computer. A computer has a perfect memory. So you can't compare humans and computers in this way. A computer could completely memorize millions of faces, or even all the faces in the world, given enough storage space. 6 Billion people x 1 MB (exaggeration) per picture is only 6 petabytes. It's a lot of data, but not out of reach. So if computers get good enough at recognizing faces, it could become a useful too in security. Think about the security guard sitting at the front desk of 20 story building. Do you think he could identify every person who walks through those doors. Would he know if you were just using a stolen security badge?