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July 13, 2007

Face Recognition Flop

From IP Mailing List:
Christian Kuhtz sent in a German story from Spiegel on how a facial recognition system operating under every day conditions had a matching rate of 30%. Its another example of the severe limitations for facial recognition. Here is the message:

Apparently the BKA (German equivalent of the FBI) tested face recognition, spent 200K euros to test the system in a rail terminal in the city of Mainz and basically declared it worthless in terms of being an investigative tool. Apparently (per the article) this is the first public trial under normal, every day conditions (rather than having the conditions manipulated for a good showing) and only matched 30%. Even when the lighting was modified to be ideal, it only reached 60%. The BKA considers the system only useful if the success rate is very near 100%.

The sample size was approximately 23,000 travelers per day over a period of roughly 3 months. The targets were 200 commuters who had volunteered for the trial and travel through this rail terminal at least once per day.

BKA recommended that this is not a suitable system for surveillance and facial recognition to try to match suspects in a manhunt etc.

Update: Another blog, CyTrap Labs claims the reporter got it wrong the the actual false positive rate was 0.1% and BKA’s own president Jörg Ziercke said these tests were a success. Since I can't read German, I can't figure this out.

Posted by rshah at July 13, 2007 01:40 PM

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