Biometric fulfilling decade-long expectations in law-enforcement and beyond
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks there were many claims about facial recognition biometrics. Some vendors claimed that if the technology had been deployed at airports, the hijackers could have been caught and the tragedy averted.
This was not one of the higher points for the technology as a number of factors show that statement to be false. First the hijackers would have had to have been known, included in the accessed database and the technology would have to work well enough to spot them in a crowd. None of these prerequisites were in place at the time.
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Thank you for an interesting and thought provoking article.
The results of the NIST evaluation referred to are publicly available at: http://www.nist.gov/customcf/getpdf.cfm?pubid=905968
The highest accuracy results obtained by the first place vendor NEC indeed demonstrate that face recognition systems are now viable for deployment. I know of at least three other independent studies that add credibility by demonstrating similiar results.
Historically, face recognition systems have had difficulty with the level of false positives, requiring very high quality photographs (as referenced in the article). There have now been recent studies testing technology in non-compliant scenarios (such as real-time CCTV surveillance) that have demonstrated high ID rates with very low levels of false positives, indicating that the technology is now ready for wider deployment.
In fact, this technology is already widely deployed in border control projects through Asia, in uses such as photographic watchlist checking, document verification in e-Gates, and real-time CCTV surveillance. These are well beyond proof-of-concept stage, and are the largest face recognition deployments in the world.
With the amazing advances in this technology over the past few years, it will be interesting to see the further potential it will obtain over the next few.
The NIST evaluation is linked correctly below:
http://face.nist.gov/