Is It Too Early to Worry About Facial Recognition?

With all the talk about face recognition in recent posts, it’s important for our readers to know exactly what it is, how it works, and what it does. CNN has posted a pretty informative article, appropriately titled “Why Face Recognition Isn’t Scary – Yet.” The article focuses on face recognition technology in general, including some of the pros and cons and more debatable points of the field.

Face recognition works with algorithms. A system compares a picture (or video) to a database of information about various faces, picking up on the facial features and measurements of parts of the face. Facial recognition algorithms are created by determining the distance between various facial features, like a person’s eyes for example – or the location or size of his or her nose. After comparing this with the database, a system can identify a picture based off of a strong source image. Of course, not all source images are perfect. Some are taken from strange angles, in low light, or the subject has a beard, glasses, or could even be wearing a scarf. Face recognition software, as a result, tends to work slower and be far less accurate when it is working from a low quality source image or if when working with large numbers of faces at once.

It’s difficult for a computer to know a human face, and even more difficult for a computer to identify one face from another. One woman interviewed in the CNN article said Picasa, Google’s photo system even thought a lollipop was a friend of hers. She says it has most trouble with babies – “All babies kind of look alike – they have little round faces. If I label one baby as my son, it will label almost every baby as my son.”

It’s true that facial recognition has its troubles, and as of yet, aside from larger social network programs like Facebook and Google’s Picasa, it’s been used in relatively limited settings. But that’s not to say that it won’t be used more widely in the near future, even if it’s supposedly not going to be real and reliable for another ten years.

The military is experimenting with the technology and it seems likely it would be used for public security, identifying people from security cameras placed in public. Does this mean there will soon be no such thing as true anonymity?

Of course, face recognition has its critics who suspect that governments and corporations could use the technology to track the public, eliminating privacy, and posing a potential threat to constitutional rights, at least here in the US.

Why face recognition isn’t scary — yet

Related articles:

1. Facial Recognition Detects Your Friends in Facebook Photos
2. How Does Facial Recognition Occur in the Brain?
3. Facial Recognition That Detects Your Younger Self
4. New Facial Recognition Software Has Some Critics
5. Facial Recognition Vending Machines
6. Facial Recognition for Facebook?
7. Ever Wonder How Facial Recognition Works?
8. New Infrared Facial Recognition
9. Face Recognition Makes Advancements
10. The Connection Between Eye Tracking and Facial Recognition