FBI using 400 million photos for facial recognition - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Homer J Simpson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2016, 09:47:13 pm
content: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/06/16/fbi-using-400-million-photos-for-facial-recognition.html?intcmp=hplnws

author: dannyf
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2016, 10:30:30 pm
content: 400 million photos. That's some serious computing power.They should get linked up with social media sites, .....No point in having video surveillance when people are doing that forr you by talking selfies.

author: bitslice
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2016, 11:28:28 pm
content: Quote from: dannyf on June 16, 2016, 10:30:30 pmI gather much of it is simply measuring the distance between facial features, so having a fixed set of points to search for is ideally suited to parallel processing, if not purpose built hardware.Bear in mind NSA's available computing power is going to be as much as they darn well want.Real time recognition of faces in a crowd is well within capabilities.Best grow a beard... wait, maybe notQuoteUmm, Facebook can already identify your face in pictures, and apparently now monitors your conversations looking for criminal activity.

author: System Error Message
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2016, 11:32:20 pm
content: So if out of random you posted, "im going to kill you" when you dont mean it literally on facebook the cops will bang on your door :O? I guess even your own opinions and thoughts are not private anymore and are used against you.

author: bitslice
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 16, 2016, 11:34:40 pm
content: Quote from: System Error Message on June 16, 2016, 11:32:20 pmDon't try it in the UK, we have moronic Judges like Jacqueline Davieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_TrialAnd yes, Facebook isn't the place to be a pedohttp://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-scans-chats-and-posts-for-criminal-activity/but like most things, today it's for pedos, tomorrow it will be talking about sharia lawhttp://www.legal-project.org/blog/2011/03/february-was-hate-speech-month-in-europe

author: System Error Message
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 12:19:04 am
content: Reading the last link, protecting religion with such laws is really wrong. Religion needs to be open to talk about, to be discussed because if you cant say anything against religion than free thinking is lost. However whats happening now that is said to be hate speech really is hate speech in the sense that things are fabricated and made to seem in a certain way which is what the media does. Seeing the BBC documentary on Britain First shows that they really were doing hate speech rather than just speaking their opinions.I guess you cant joke anymore, filtering has gotten so good that even the false positives are prosecuted.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 12:47:35 am
content: There needs to be more information to know if this is either useful or worrying. If it is a training set for a recognition algorithm it is useful. Duplications (especially known duplications) are particularly good for testing and training. If it is at least partly a production system and is 99.99% accurate it might be useful. If you have a known bad actor on the loose and instead of having to follow up on millions of surveillance camera images you have only a few hundred worth further tracking it is useful. If arrests are made or people are prevented from flying or other activity based on only a 99.99% accuracy it is very worrying.The mere existence of facial recognition is nothing magic. Everything from Xbox to the newest cell phones does it.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 04:07:49 am
content: It's not just the FBI doing this. Many State Police organisations worldwide have had this functionality for years. Think of it like a Google image search; Feed an image in, get possible hits out.People just need to realise that what they post on the internet isn't protected, even if you "lock down" your social media accounts with their privacy settings. Your privacy settings don't mean a thing when it comes to law enforcement and their ability to access your information.

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 05:53:06 am
content: With high enough resolution cameras and enough faces they can identify everyone passing by a public square, in case there is a search warrant for anyone or they want to identify people who may have committed a crime from a surveillance video. If they have 411 million unique photos, that accounts for everyone in the USA plus another ~100 million from other sources... Likely from those entering USA as travellers from other countries since at least at the airports they take your photo at those "KIOSK" computers where you scan your passport (which I have had to do every time I fly to the USA).Now I wonder if they manage to do this "real-time" or if it will be only "after the fact". For example, if there is an incident, they scrub the video through their huge computer database and identify everyone in it..... OR..... with enough computing power they can have the live video feed stream into their systems and do on-the-fly real tracking.Welcome to a type of "Minority Report" situation, in which people of interest to the FBI are going to be monitored 24/7 and maybe caught before a crime is committed. Big Brother is watching!

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 06:03:53 am
content: There are companies specialized in high resolution camera systems with tracking and facial recognition. Of which I know at least the tracking is real-time.They apply this on crowded events (eg: UEFA 2016) to track down people who don't behave.iirc one of those systems is made by the same dutch company (thales) that makes solid state radar systems capable of accidentally finding the USA newest stealth fighter flying over. Oops.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 04:19:27 pm
content: I have entered countries where there is a large monitor screen displaying the results of face detection and tracking as you approach the passport counter. Don't know if recognition was also involved, but I would assume so. Face recognition at moderate accuracy is not that difficult. I saw demonstrations more than twenty years ago that were showing high 90s percent accuracy and ran on a single Macintosh computer with no hardware accelerators in "real" time (meaning only a couple of seconds from image presentation to output) with a modest (few hundred) image set. This software was pretty robust to simple disguises like beards, cheek pads, glasses and the like. The difficulty comes as you keep adding 9s to the accuracy requirement. It is just like text recognition. There are tons of software packages that can achieve 97% or higher accuracy on a wide range of textual matter. Only a very few do anything like 99.9% or better accuracy on general text, and then only on fairly high visual quality input.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2016, 09:39:47 pm
content: Quote from: Jeroen3 on June 17, 2016, 06:03:53 amThey just need to be immune to the old manpads being handed out toterroristsfreedom-fightersarmed opposition supported around the world.PS. oops, those are IR of course.

author: Red Squirrel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 18, 2016, 07:05:45 pm
content: Pretty scary stuff. I recall reading something about them having drones in the sky too that can do face recognition, from like 60k feet or something crazy like that.Seems the tin foil hat idea is not that far off. Need a tin foil face shield too.Guessing a lot of those cameras work at the thermal level as well so they can see you even in the dark.