Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing

http://ipvm.com/updates/1993

by jhonovich • 13 years ago

98 98 13 years ago

When the FBI released the photos of the two suspects, I kept wondering, "Why do they need the publics help when I'm sure there is facial recognition software to help match the suspects' faces?" Well I guess this article somewhat answers this, but I am still in disbelief that our government does not have better software.

For how long it took to discover their names, the two suspects had TOO much time to escape. They had about 48 hours to book flights out of the country, flee to another part of the country, do more damage, etc. The lack of facial recognition software could have ultimately led to this case being unnecessarily longer. This is an issue that CAN and NEEDS to be fixed quickly--in fact, I hope the government is working on a more sophisticated facial recognition software right now. Ideally, the facial recognition software should be able to crawl through the web to search for faces.

Now that I think about it, a good hacker could build a search engine that allows people to post photos and the program will run an automated search across the web (Social networks, Google, etc.) to see which pictures match it. Hell, Facebook even has facial recognition to some extent. A more sophisticated one cannot be that difficult for the government to build and put to use.

mjn• 13 years ago

There is a lot of money being put into facial recognition software by law enforcement and the military (including DARPA), so it's certainly the case that it's being worked on. But it's a hard problem, especially to do robustly at a large scale. What they do have is almost certainly the state of the art— in fact much of the current commercial state-of-the-art is itself based on stuff developed in older DARPA projects.

sp3322• 13 years ago

Facebook only has to distinguish among friends of the uploader. And it's not perfect. This man was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. He would not have been identifiable out of the tens of thousands of people at the event, matched across the (probably) millions of people in the database.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

Plus Facebook gets high resolution pictures of people's faces, and asks for confirmation. It doesn't get it right every time.

sy_r0y• 13 years ago

I get what you mean when you say these guys had way too much time to make some kind of an escape and I agree then that there is an absolute need for a much better software. Having said that, I do not think it would be wise for government to build and use an "image crawler" to search and store images of citizens...it would provoke widespread criticism concerning privacy of millions of citizens. On top of that in this particular instance, the police commissioner points out that "both Tsarnaevs’ images exist in official databases"..the software failed to make a match.

sehugg• 13 years ago

What's wrong with needing the public's help? The public did a great job in providing critical evidence.

Maybe instead of more intrusive surveillance we find more ways for the public to participate. Maybe we uphold the public's right to take pictures and video in "sensitive areas". Etc.

bsenftner• 13 years ago

My big questions is why were the suspects faces in the database? Why would a 19 year old, never done anything face be in the facial recognition database?

dr_doom• 13 years ago

The older brother had been questioned by the FBI before.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57580534/fbi-interviewed...

DannyBee2• 13 years ago

Best random guess: Something related to him being an alien and becoming a naturalized citizen

DannyBee2• 13 years ago

Actually, figured it out:

Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver’s license, and those pictures go into a facial recognition database.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside...

sp3322• 13 years ago

He's 19, so he likely has a driver's license or other state-issued ID photo on file.

ics• 13 years ago

I'm going to venture to guess that either a) the officer was talking out of his ass to make a quick point or b) someone, somewhere massively scraped every social network they could think of for anyone with ties to the area or the event. That being said, I don't really like the sound of it either, regardless of how true it is.

--pre-submit thought: perhaps it was the older brother? Our background is rather limited but it would not be surprising if he had had prior run-ins with the law. Even a minor offense will get your mugshot in the file.

nwh2• 13 years ago

> massively scraped every social network

Funnily enough, if you download your information using Facebook's tools, you get a copy of your facial recognition data too. Presumably US law enforcement has access to that for their own uses.

UnoriginalGuy• 13 years ago

Everyone who enters the US is photographed and fingerprinted (e.g. tourists, visitors, etc).

Everyone who applies for a US visa is additionally photographed and fingerprinted.

Everyone who applies for naturalisation is additionally photographed and fingerprinted.

The suspects did all three of these things. The US government has almost every foreigner legally on American soil in a database.

Plus then you have the DNV on top of that and or passport office.

mrkmcknz• 13 years ago

Does anyone have detailed knowledge of startups in this space?

I know of Lambda labs but I personally haven't use their solution post Face.com.

brk3• 13 years ago

There are a few, though less than you might think. Lots of general progress has been made in terms of facial detection algorithms, but there are almost no "general" security camera deployments that are setup to capture sufficient detail to get a good face match.

There are not enough events like this in open places that drive requirements for facial recognition use. Limited cases (airports, casinos, etc.) more frequently have cameras setup to get good straight-on high-res facial shots, but almost no typical outdoor area is covered that way.

jhonovich2• 13 years ago

I am the author of the referenced article. The problem is matching surveillance camera images (like from Lord & Taylor's) is impossible because of the steep down tilt angle of the cameras plus their low resolution. Smartphone images could be a little better as the angle is more head on and the resolution is higher. However, even those images tended to be in a wide field of view which means low pixel density, hurting matching performance. Last, but not least, the caps and sunglasses hurt recognition as well.

xfs• 13 years ago

Matching surveillance camera images is always possible no matter how bad the image quality is. The only matter is how many false positives show up.

Facial recognition algorithms always give their best matching candidates, with thresholds to skip those not quite matching ones. Your article makes it sound like no such results were produced at all, which is unlikely how recognition is supposed to work.

onli• 13 years ago

Not impossible though. Given that such software is used to steer the future efforts of the investigators, it is possible that the software does say "no match found" if the probability of a real match is too low.

jhonovich2• 13 years ago

First of all, almost any facial surveillance system would simply reject images like those from Lord & Taylor's. The pixel density is simply too low to even attempt plus the downtilt would also likely trigger a rejection. That's how facial recognition does work in practice.

Even if the system would allow it, not only would false positives be enormous, you'd probably miss the match as well (false negative).

akennberg• 13 years ago

Interesting to see articles promoting adding more surveillance cameras for all their flaws (bad angle, resolution trails behind phone cameras, etc). I would focus on acquiring publicly available photo data in real time at dense events and scan them. I.e. crowdsourced surveillance. I'm sure someone is working on that.

melling• 13 years ago

Why is surveillance video not HD? Shouldn't this quality be almost a commodity by now? How different are these cameras than what you get in, say the latest Samsung Galaxy S4, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S4

yk• 13 years ago

Surveillance cameras are typically bought and then forgotten. So the new ones are probably HD, but you get a collection of cameras between HD and Betamax if you look at the cameras that are actually in use.

runarb2• 13 years ago

Its not only about the cameras. Its currently expensive to store all that HD video. ( and now, one cant just upload it to the cloud. Necessary bandwidth isn't yet available locally ).

One are also dealing with a lot of legacy systems her. But the next generation surveillance system will probably be HD, and then maybe 3D, 4k, 16k etc.

tripzilch2• 13 years ago

Probably because the cost of surveillance cameras is more than just the cost of the resolution or storage. the ones that hang outside need to be weather proof and vandalism proof. they were probably bought as part of a large and expensive system, intended to be paid off over 10-15 years[0], to replace all those cameras whenever more resolution becomes available, is probably quite expensive, regardless of how cheap the actual camera is. It's a lot of cameras, in a lot of hard-to-reach places, with expensive reinforced casings, and would the output format of the cameras be compatible with the old system?

OTOH, I do actually see more and more HD (or relatively high def) surveillance footage. It all depends on how when the security system was installed, I guess. Also smaller businesses can afford a shorter turnaround for these things, as well as not having the handicap of a head-start[1].

[0] actually I'm guessing those lifetime spans, it seems a bit much? but I also can't see anyone signing off on a security system that's expected to be replaced in 5 years. good thing my job isn't facility management ... :P

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_handicap_of_a_head_s... , how odd, is there no common English phrase for this law?

AutoCorrect• 13 years ago

with so many distributed cameras, why not use them to make a composite, hi-def image, like we do with radio telescopes?

pdevr• 13 years ago

Thank you for the article.

In a real life scenario, surveillance camera images are all you will get to work with, most likely. So maybe, the focus should be on figuring a way out to recognize individuals based on images taken at those angles. Is there any progress in this regard?

marknutter• 13 years ago

How hard would it be to throw off facial recognition by simply wearing very high quality makeup and prosthetics to alter your facial appearance (ala hollywood movies)? If I were the boston bombers, I would have first learned how to make myself look completely different. It's unbelievable to me that these guys didn't realize they'd be captured on tons of cameras that day.

nwh2• 13 years ago

If you wore Mission Impossible style masks, there's no reason why the facial recognition would be able to pick you up from underneath. You might alert the suspicion of people around you more though, as they don't ever seem to be perfect.

runarb2• 13 years ago

What if you wore something like this: http://www.spfxmasks.com/ourmasks.php ?

One should be able to blend in, and make video surveillance pretty useless...

Edit: Did work for this robbers: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2192115/Robbers-disg...

Plimsoll• 13 years ago

This brings to mind this bank robbery news from few years aback: http://gizmodo.com/5711252/white-guy-becomes-black-bank-robb...

Don't know how easy it is to get those masks though.

speednoise• 13 years ago

Easier than you may think: http://cvdazzle.com/

gcr4• 13 years ago

CV-Dazzle attempts to throw off face detectors by doing just that: http://cvdazzle.com/

But then again, the police will label you as "that guy with weird bits of plastic on his face", which won't help you hide at all.

dyno12345• 13 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/Accoutrements-Fuzzy-Glasses-Classic-Di...

Costs $3, will beat any facial recognition

anigbrowl4• 13 years ago

'Classic disguise, unless you already look like this'

openmx3• 13 years ago

Or just wear sunglasses or greasy sunscreen...

jere• 13 years ago

I watched this lecture recently http://youtu.be/-IUe3ce_29I which talked about how hard it is to do image recognition at low resolution. One solution is a "fovea" system that scans an area for interesting items and zooms in on them with a high resolution camera automatically to get better recognition.

I wonder if this would help in similar instances. A system that uses facial detection to isolate faces and then zoom in on them very quickly seems feasible. I'm assuming it would be overwhelmed in a scenario like a marathon of course, but perhaps it would help in other situations.

eksith• 13 years ago

Bottom line is that it's nearly impossible to exactly match facial features to anyone beyond a set distance when there's too much ambiguity between distances and rubbish quality CCTV video.

Matching gait may be a more effective means of identification at a distance (and, in this and many other cases, at odd angles).

http://www.am.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp/~sagawa/pdf/accv06.pdf (PDF)

jpalomaki• 13 years ago

I can understand that recording live footage with very high quality is a problem, but how about capturing quality stills to complement the video with lower quality.

emiliobumachar• 13 years ago

Someone with knowledge of cameras please either correct or endorse this, but I think the largest price/quality tradeoff in any camera happens at the lens choice, and given a cheap lens, the stills can't be much better than the video.

securingsincity2• 13 years ago

certainly the lens and sensor are the biggest trade offs with price these would have the biggest impact with image clarity and the amount of light taken in to take the image.

tripzilch2• 13 years ago

I think that is right (I can't claim much specific knowledge on camera lenses though), it used to be especially bad with the whole "megapixel wars" a few years back. Pixel resolution increased, but image clarity didn't, and you would get much better images on old low-megapixel cameras with relatively high-end lenses than with a cheap but new camera of approx 4-8x the resolution in pixels.

However, nowadays I am quite amazed by the picture quality of the average smartphone camera. So maybe something changed? Still, we're talking about better lenses/quality than smartphone photos. They may be sharp, but that comes from the advantage of being up close and coming in huge numbers.

And in addition to the lens, there's a lot of other expensive parts in a security system, that may need to be replaced or reconfigured because it is all integrated with the current low-res cameras. The bigger such a system is, the more expensive it becomes to change it all up when better tech has come around, even if the new parts are relatively cheap by themselves.

brk3• 13 years ago

Not exactly.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that most security cameras are not setup for capture of facial details (or license plates for that matter).

Most security cameras are setup for general overview shots, with around 10-20ppf (pixels per foot), whereas good detail starts at around 80ppf (meaning that you'd need 4x as many cameras in most areas to start to get something approaching an image quality that you could use for reliable facial recognition.

On top of that there is the storage factor. A "common" camera in a new deployment is a 1080p (2.1 Megapixel) camera. If this is set to record good quality images 24/7, it consumes about 60GB of storage per day. Various tricks like "record on motion", etc. can reduce this to maybe 10GB/day, at the risk of potentially missing key evidence or having gaps in the recording.

Lenses are important, but it's not that hard to find a lens with sufficient resolution for these cameras. A good lens rated at 2+ megapixels is around $70-$120 (depending on various factors), and a good outdoor camera (including lens) can be had for $500-$1200. Big price ranges, yes, but not to the point that the lenses are the limiting factor budget-wise.

mikecane• 13 years ago

How to camouflage yourself from facial recognition technology http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/02/facial-recognition-camoufl...

anigbrowl4• 13 years ago

That's not conspicuous at all. And like zebras, there's no benefit unless everyone else is doing it.

okamiueru• 13 years ago

Dazzle camouflage isn't meant to hide you in your surroundings, but rather make it more difficult to assess the geometry -- how large you are, where you are heading, etc.

It's more for confusing the lion running after the zebra, than an attempt hide from the lion.

ck24• 13 years ago

Not just facial recognition, the "terror watch list" failed (after a warning from Russia about the older brother) lack of background checks on the AR15s they owned failed, the secured perimeter failed (the teenager was outside of it) the city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown).

In the end it was mostly dumb luck, dumb criminals, and the fact the poor victim who lost their legs managed to survive. In fact that was the success, that more wounded people didn't die thanks to fantastic work by the hospital and doctors.

Instead of patting law enforcement on their backs, how about thanking the doctors, where is their applause?

afarrell• 13 years ago

Actually, the lockdown was voluntary, though with strong community pressure to comply.

But yes, multiple subsystems failed in the police response. If you listened to police scanners, you also heard that they had some trouble identifying streets correctly, or keeping their mics off when not talking. But police response protocols are one human system that definitely needs to be able to work in the face of multiple subsystem failure. I say judge the police on how the response worked as a whole.

I have to say though, thank god that Dunkin' Doughnuts' Tactical Ration Deployment Vehicle ran smoothly.

ck24• 13 years ago

Talking about the scanners and technology (and failures) didn't "homeland security" give millions to metro police departments around the country to get their communication encrypted? I vaguely remember reading about that a couple years ago. I wonder where that money went if that is accurate.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22federal+grant%22+%22encry...

securingsincity2• 13 years ago

to be fair if you live in Massachusetts you would know, all of the streets are not marked as you would expect in other areas. If there are street signs at intersection often times only one of the streets is marked.

jameshart2• 13 years ago

The order to close businesses was pretty broadly heeded, and with no workplaces, shops, daycares or school programs to go to the voluntary 'shelter in place' situation became pretty mandatory, even for people outside the lockdown but working in the Boston area.

unvs• 13 years ago

I believe the curfew had been lifted moments before he went outside for a cigarette - at least that's what's been reported over and over and over.

ck24• 13 years ago

So the curfew actually prevented earlier discovery of the younger brother, interesting.

Anechoic• 13 years ago

city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown)

But for the shelter-in-place order (it wasn't a lockdown or curfew) the guy may not have been home in the first place for find Tsarnaev.

localhost3000• 13 years ago

this is absurd. i'm in Boston. there is absolutely no shortage of support and praise for the doctors and hospitals here.

lots of things went wrong for this to happen. thanks for pointing out the painfully obvious. our police deserve the "pats on the back" (which, by the way, is an extremely condescending way to put it) they're getting, and more.

joosters• 13 years ago

We don't yet know if the "terror watch list" failed. Perhaps he was checked and they found nothing, because at that time, they weren't terrorists and weren't planning a terrorist attact at that point? We're not living in a minority-report style pre-crime detection world yet.

kevincennis2• 13 years ago

It seems disingenuous to say that facial recognition failed. As far as I can tell, all the images we had of these suspects were either very low-resolution, taken from angles, or both. Seems plausible that law enforcement didn't have any good candidate images from which to run a facial recognition search.

> In the end it was mostly dumb luck

What? Painstaking police work went in to getting images of these suspects, and the release of those photos are almost certainly what led to Thursday's events and, ultimately, the killing and capture of the suspects.

> the city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown)

Firstly, the lockdown is what forced suspect #2 to hide out in a boat instead of fleeing the area. Secondly, and less importantly, the guy smoking a cigarette wasn't violating the lockdown. It had ended prior to him going outside.

Was there luck involved? Of course. But there was also tremendous work done by a number of law enforcement agencies - without which, the suspects may never have been killed and captured.

ck24• 13 years ago

The brothers didn't leave the area, didn't go into hiding and were able to kill a campus officer and hijack a car, all without police finding them for a week.

It was mostly dumb luck. It's not like they were hiding!

Oh, and http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/03/27/hanover-police-trying-...

ajdecon• 13 years ago

> It seems disingenuous to say that facial recognition failed. As far as I can tell, all the images we had of these suspects were either very low-resolution, taken from angles, or both. Seems plausible that law enforcement didn't have any good candidate images from which to run a facial recognition search.

"Failed" might be too strong, but I'd definitely say it's not yet ready for deployment.

My impression is that the Boston marathon was extremely well-photographed from a variety of angles, by everything from nearby security cameras to folks in the crowd. This seems like the best kind of data set you'd reasonably expect outside a controlled environment (i.e., a lab or security checkpoint). If it's not yet good enough to at least flag possible matches based on this data, I'm not sure I believe it's ready for widespread use.

lttlrck• 13 years ago

It wasn't a lockdown, it was 'shelter in place'.

logn• 13 years ago

Also, our Internet surveillance dragnet failed too.

I guess when you create a panopticon you're relying more on psychology than surveillance.

bazillion• 13 years ago

What you fail to realize is that the "terror watch list" you speak of doesn't hold people on it from just any hearsay. The articles said that the FBI did its due diligence and found no reason to continue an investigation on them.

Think about it this way: would you want just anyone to be watchlisted based on tips that could be politically motivated, intentionally misleading, or just completely factually inaccurate?

What you can never account for in terrorism screening is the lone-wolf element. There will always be some fringe guys in parts of the world who hatch their plots outside of the view of what we're able to observe. The only options you have are to limit their access to harmful weapons/devices, or contain them as fast as possible when they do go on the offensive.

Yes, doctors and other emergency responders did a great job, but don't be so quick to take away a victory from law enforcement when there are very few positive stories circulated about them ever. The boston marathon runners/crowd didn't know they were putting their lives on the line that day. Law enforcement, on the other hand, made a conscious decision to do so.

lostlogin• 13 years ago

Fringe guy in part of the world. Usually these guys have been Americans in America as far as attacks within the USA go.

MichaelSalib• 13 years ago

that more wounded people didn't die thanks to fantastic work by the hospital and doctors

The EMTs and hospitals did marvelous work, but one nonobvious fact that helped a great deal was that the bombing was within 2 miles of FIVE DIFFERENT level 1 trauma centers. All five are world class teaching hospitals and one of them, MGH, had been recognized as the best hospital in the US at one point.

There are several states that don't have even a single level 1 trauma center....

darkarmani• 13 years ago

> In the end it was mostly dumb luck

Flamebait. Anything people point out, you just define as luck. Luck that LEO found evidence, had pictures of the perps, etc.

lsllc• 13 years ago

According to Cambridge Police, neither brother had a gun permit:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2013/04/21/ma...

Massachusetts does in fact have an assault weapon ban in place (similar to the 1994 Federal AWB), although you can get modified/MA-compliant versions of many "assault weapons" such as the AR-15/AK that are legal, however you are limited to a 10 round magazine. They would have needed a Class-A LTC to even contemplate owning such a weapon -- this involves fingerprints, a full background check, references and a "letter of purpose" along with permission from your local police chief to get.

However, the younger brother was too young to get a permit, the older brother was in fact not a US citizen and was here on a green card and thus is ineligible for a gun permit. Having said that, even if he was a US citizen his previous arrest for domestic assault would've rendered him ineligible for/and or revoked an existing LTC-A had he had one.

I have not seen anything yet reported as to what kind of long gun(s) they had or where they got them. The FBI warned agents responding to Watertown on Thursday night that they had "fully automatic AK47s" [along with grenades/dynamite and IEDs]. It is my understanding that they only recovered two handguns at the scene of the firefight in Watertown and one handgun and a long gun were found on the boat after the final surrender [aside from the IEDs scattered over Watertown].

It is interesting that despite the incredible firepower the brothers had access to (handguns, long gun(s), multiple IEDs), that when there's someone shooting back, the brothers plans were pretty much shut down and the loss of life/injury was very minimal considering the circumstances.

astar• 13 years ago

Facial recognition is still treated like some magical technology, like the "zoom in, enhance" feature much mocked about on TV crime shows. I bet Facebook's technology is ahead of law enforcement's in terms of data, algorithm, and refinement, and yet it still stumbles on pretty obvious faces (if you have the default auto-tag feature left on)

brk3• 13 years ago

Correct, and you're talking about cases where you might have literally 500,000+ pixels on a face (close-up shot from an 8MP camera).

The average cctv shot will have around 200-1000 pixels on the entire face, if you're lucky.

gcr4• 13 years ago

Facebook only has to distinguish between friends of the uploader.

US law enforcement has to distinguish between 300 million civilians.

Of the two, I would expect Facebook to be more successful at identifying peolpe.

anigbrowl4• 13 years ago

"zoom in, enhance" feature much mocked about on TV crime shows

Actually, those jokes refer to a scene in Blade Runner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHepKd38pr0

socillion• 13 years ago

NTSF:SD:SUV Parody of the 'enhance' trope in cop drama setting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbCWYm7B_B4&t=58s

WestCoastJustin• 13 years ago

Why did it fail? That, to me, is the most interesting unanswered question.

new_test• 13 years ago

Because facial recognition is a very difficult problem.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

Surely all you need to do is start an agile startup and throw some Ruby on Rails at the problem?

gcr4• 13 years ago

The problem is that any non-perfect automated system will wrongly convict so many civilians as being terrorists that nobody will trust it anymore.

Let's say that you want to catch terrorists creeping around in your airport. To do this, you have a magic camera that, when it takes a picture of a civilian, compares it to a picture of a known terrorist. If they're in fact the same person, it will flag security over. Let's say that it is indeed a magic camera and makes the correct decision 99.99% of the time, which is far better than the current state of the art[1].

Do you have any idea how much DHS or DoD would pay for such a magic camera?

But it won't be enough.

Consider a watch list of 100 terrorists that we're looking for in our airport. If our camera compares each civilian's picture to all 100 terrorists in succession, and if we model each comparison as a Bernoulli trial, then each civilian has a 0.9999^100 = 99.004% chance of getting through security unfazed, which means we flag innocent people as terrorists about 1% of the time.

This doesn't work in an airport setting. Assuming 5,000 people pass through your small airport per hour and you have a 14-hour day, that means your security people have to go through 0.01 * 5000 * 14 = 700 false alarms each day. That's about 1.2 false alarms per minute. Your security people will have to go through all their checks each time this happens. Before long, they're going to stop trusting your magic camera.

As you scale your watch list up, it gets worse. How well would it work for 1,000 people on the watch list? 10,000? Note that the current US watch list has 50,000 people on it.

Even if it were a perfect magic camera, it coudln't catch terrorists on their maiden crime who aren't on the watch list at all.

(Most of this post was adapted from: http://vast.uccs.edu/~tboult/tmp/IJCB11-tutorial-boult.ppt , which is a really interesting presentation if you're interested in these sorts of things.)

1: http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html

stretchwithme• 13 years ago

Do you know how unreliably people recognize strangers? Many people are already wrongly convicted on such evidence.

Even perfect automated facial recognition won't convict people. It will merely point out people that should be looked at. If a jury looking at the image and the guy's face think the system is wrong, they can disregard it.

As far as prevention goes, what we need are systems that can detect deception reliably, which will help if we ever decide to ask people meaningful questions. Not to convict, but to focus attention on a possible threat.

gcr4• 13 years ago

Sure, I should have picked a better word than "Convict", especially since I didn't mean it in a legal sense. Given the context, "flag" or "decide" or "indicate" would have worked better. I only wanted to convey that the system thinks the probe and gallery pictures are the same person

aidenn0• 13 years ago

This is a completely different situation; there are 2 people we have pictures of that we know are terrorists; we have a database of suspected terrorists; had we found 100 matches in that database, with one of them being the right one, it would have narrowed the investigation considerably. It was the perfect situation for AFR, had AFR either been more advanced, or the pictures been more amenable to current AFR technology.

Facial Recognition Failed in Boston Bombing

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