Facial Recognition Accuracy
Since my last two posts have been about biometrics how about one related concerning crowd facial recognition? Bruce Schneier points to German test results (in German):
Two hundred frequent travellers volunteered to have their faces recorded and three different systems tried to recognize the faces in the crowds of a train station. Results (in German): 60% recognition at best, 30% on average (depending on light and other factors).
Facial recognition in a crowded public place seems like an extraordinarily hard computing problem to solve. Oditogre, an early commenter to Bruce’s original post raises an interesting question:
Google translator mangled it pretty badly, but I got the gist enough that it didn’t seem to say how many false positives there were. That would be the biggest issue, to me. If they can achieve 30% recognition rate with 0% false positive rate, that could well be a very effective system for catching fugitives, but otherwise, it’s just going to be a bad waste of money.
I personally don’t see how you can have a 30% success rate with zero false positives. Network IDS systems can’t prevent false positives and they’re working with binary data. Later on in the comments it appears that the false positive rate was .1%. While this may seem good, imagine how many folks will walk past a particular point in Times Square today or the Otemachi metro station in Tokyo.
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