Tag Archives | Facial Recognition

NYPD’s New Facial Recognition Unit Using Instagram And Facebook Photos To Identify Suspects

By on March 28, 2013 in News 0

Social networking sites are a great way to meet and connect with new people, such as cops. DNAinfo New York writes:

Police are searching for suspects’ photos on Instagram and Facebook, then running them through the NYPD’s new Facial Recognition Unit to put a face to a name, DNAinfo New York has learned.

Detectives are now breaking cases across the city thanks to the futuristic technology that marries mug shots of known criminals with pictures gleaned from social media, surveillance cameras and anywhere else cops can find images.

[An] official explained how the new technology worked after a recent street robbery where a woman reported her jewelry stolen by her gal pal’s boyfriend. She did not know his name, only that he was likely in photos on his girlfriend’s Facebook page. “We did not have his name, but we found a photo and the Facial Recognition Unit got a hit.”

The new investigative entity was formally launched late last year, with eight cops working in teams of four manning the operations.

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PSYOPS 101: The Technology of Psych Warfare

By on November 15, 2012 in News 1

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“As we have examined in this special series of Eyeopener reports on psychological warfare in recent weeks, Psychological Operations, or PSYOPS, are every bit as vital to military strategists today as they ever were. In fact, in this age of 24/7 online access and the possibilities for new battlegrounds in the “information battlespace” that it affords, Psyops may be even more important than they have ever been in “winning the hearts and minds” (or at least confusing and stupefying the hearts and minds) of enemies the world over.

In some ways, this is precisely the point. Psyops by their very nature tend to rely on mechanical and technological trickery to deceive enemies or sneak propaganda past their defenses. Some of the greatest military victories in history did not involve fighting or bloodshed at all, but merely intimidation through demonstration of technological superiority.”

Read more at CorbettReport.com

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How To Conceal Your Face From Machines

By on September 17, 2012 in News 27

CV Dazzle is a project to develop a toolkit of styling and beauty-based methods to fight back against camera and computer facial recognition, allowing you to hide in plain sight:

The primary objective [is] thwarting face detection under the guise of high-fashion aesthetics. While there are several obvious approaches to hiding from face detection, some of these can be dismissed.

Sunglasses, for example, are a known occlusion which some algorithms account for. Wearing masks in public can be illegal. Hoods are popular and effective but make the wearer’s intent to hide too obvious. As an alternative, this project explores ways using ambiguously deceptive fashion.

CV Dazzle™ is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs. The name is derived from a type of camouflage used during WWI, called Dazzle, which was used to break apart the gestalt-image of warships, making it hard to discern their directionality, size, and orientation.

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FBI Begins $1 Billion Face Recognition Project

By on September 11, 2012 in News 17

Expect plastic surgery to be a booming field starting in 2014. Via New Scientist:

As part of an update to the national fingerprint database, the FBI has begun rolling out facial recognition to identify criminals.

It will form part of the bureau’s long-awaited, $1 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) programme, which will also add biometrics such as iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification to the toolkit. A handful of states began uploading their photos as part of a pilot programme this February and it is expected to be rolled out nationwide by 2014. In addition to scanning mugshots for a match, FBI officials have indicated that they are keen to track a suspect by picking out their face in a crowd.

But privacy advocates are worried by the broad scope of the FBI’s plans. They are concerned that people with no criminal record who are caught on camera alongside a person of interest could end up in a federal database, or be subject to unwarranted surveillance.

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On How Computers See Race

By on August 23, 2012 in News 4

Does technology covertly holds the biases of its creators? Alexis Stevens in Cluster Magazine writes about an unintended dimension of of facial-recognition-based surveillance software:

“HP Computers are Racist” is a 2009 YouTube video in which two electronics store employees demonstrate how face recognition and video tracking technology on Hewlett-Packard computers works more accurately for people of whiter skin tones. “I think,” one of the employees remarks with biting accuracy, “my blackness is interfering with the computer’s ability to—to follow me.”

The company issued an apology after the clip went viral, suggesting that face-detection algorithms have more difficulty identifying the contrast that helps discern facial structure in low lighting. An ironic outcome of this corporate oversight is that while black people are more likely to be eyed as suspicious and tracked in real life (e.g. stop-and-frisk), the engineering of webcams for a presumptively white target audience renders people of color more invisible to technology.

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New Billboard Ads Will Use Facial Recognition Technology

By on July 28, 2012 in News 12

Karen Chan 16 (CC)

It sounds like something from one of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels, proving once again how prescient Mr. Gibson was regarding the tense relationship between humans and technology. Sarah Freishtat reports for the Washington Times:

As you scan the face on that giant billboard, it may just be scanning your face right back.

Increasingly sophisticated digital facial-recognition technology is opening new possibilities in business, marketing, advertising and law enforcement while exacerbating fears about the loss of privacy and the violation of civil liberties.

Businesses foresee a day when signs and billboards with face-recognition technology can instantly scan your face and track what other ads you’ve seen recently, adjust their message to your tastes and buying history and even track your birthday or recent home purchase. The FBI and other U.S. law enforcement agencies already are exploring facial-recognition tools to track suspects, quickly single out dangerous people in a crowd or match a grainy security-camera image against a vast database to look for matches.

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How To Hide From Face-Detection Technology

By on April 30, 2012 in News 7

This could be a very important skill, pay attention kids! By John D. Sutter for CNN:

If you take Adam Harvey’s advice, here’s what you might wanna wear to a party this weekend: A funny hat, asymmetrical glasses, a tuft of hair that dangles off your nose bridge and, most likely, a black-and-white triangle taped to your cheekbone. Optional: Cubic makeup patterns all around your eyes.

All of these otherworldly fashion accessories – which could leave a person looking kind of like an opulent villain from “The Hunger Games” – have a singular goal: to stop your face from being detected by cameras and computers. Called CV Dazzle (short for “computer vision dazzle;” more on the name later), Harvey’s project is a provocative and largely theoretical response to the rise of surveillance cameras on street corners and face-detecting technology that’s been incorporated into social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr.

If you employ these techniques, Harvey, 30, hopes computers won’t even know…

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Machine Pareidolia: The Faces Hidden Around Us

By on April 27, 2012 in News 2

Via Urban Honking, a strange experiment in using facial recognition technology to find the face-like forms constantly embedded in our surroundings. What does it all mean?

Pareidolia [is] the natural human inclination to see faces everywhere around us. Matt Jones advocates designing faces into new technology products as a way of making them more approachable, using pareidolia to give products personality and humanize them.

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Facial recognition techniques give computers their own flavor of pareidolia. In addition to responding to actual human faces, facial recognition systems, just like the human vision system, sometimes produce false positives, latching onto some set of features in the image as matching their model of a face.

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New Surveillance Camera Can Search 36 Million Faces For Matches Per Second

By on March 26, 2012 in News 4

The story of your life is being filmed and photographed each day, and soon will be searchable. Via PhysOrg:

A new surveillance camera by Hitachi Kokusai Electric can look at footage that contains an image of someone, either still or video, and then search other video or still images on file for other instances of that same face. It can search, process and display up to thirty six million faces in just one second. Each hit is displayed immediately, in thumbnail form, which its makers say, allows the camera to display the actions of a person prior to, or after, being seen by the surveillance camera.

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