8 ms·

London Police ‘Super Recognizer’ Walks Beat with a Facebook of the Mind

70 points by snewman 11y ago

lockes5hadow 11y ago
"Computers are no match for super recognizers..." Give it time.
- methehack 11y ago
  It's not really a competition. Yet. Anyway, I think you're missing the point. There's a great mystery here. How can the human mind do this? "Facial recognition software managed to identify one suspect of the 4,000 captured by security cameras during the London riots. Constable Collins identified 180". And dollars to donuts Constable Collins used a fraction of the energy too -- maybe even a just a donut's worth -- he is a copper after all.
  - tedks 11y ago
    I'm sure his false positive rate is zero, and that he's never caused an innocent person to be arrested or imprisoned. After all, he's in the top 1% on a test designed by people from Harvard. Yes, Harvard. Thank the lord that once a policeman's fingered a known criminal, a jury will never disagree with them. I bet his conviction rate is stellar.
    - PepeGomez 11y ago
      I doubt they arrest somebody just based on that.
      - tedks 11y ago
        They named a person in the article based just on this police officer's word. He might never be able to get a job again if this article stays on the first page of google hits for his name. Who knows if he's the same person? Is there anything else it could be based on?
  - lips 11y ago
    Indeed. My first thought was "Are tech companies trying to poach these folks in order to try and deconstruct what cues they're using, and/or to create a corpus of verified matches from low-quality source?"
  - fauigerzigerk 11y ago
    > How can the human mind do this? I think the most interesting point about this is that the human mind doesn't know how the human mind does it. I wonder what kind of software they compared to Constable Collins. Did that software use designed features or learned features? What sort of data set was it trained on? It wouldn't surprise me if current state of the art software that learns features from real CCTV footage fared a lot better than what they were using in 2011.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 11y ago
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blazespin 11y ago
Super powers! That is so awesome.
TravisJamison 11y ago
"WITH its estimated one million security cameras, London is pioneering a new area of detection". - Insane, and scary.
- iofj 11y ago
  ... and of course making the problem systematically worse. They explicitly state that they're after people who were filmed - just filmed - at the London riots a few years ago. They're looking to arrest them, and to extract damages from them. At those riots, absolute worst case 10-20% of people will have stolen or smashed things, with most just rallying for justice. But that doesn't even matter. The vast majority of those people aren't criminals, and even of the ones that did commit criminal acts during those riots 99% aren't "regular criminals" (meaning any more disrespectful of laws than a bad landlord is, day-to-day). But arresting these people will seriously impact their situation, their job, their prospects, and bring them a LOT closer to becoming criminals. And even the ones where it doesn't make them criminals, it will make them much more likely to riot again, for obvious reasons. This is stupid, dangerous, and merely meant to make a few people in power feel good about themselves.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    I may have missed it, but I didn't see where the article states that they were after people who were merely present. It implies that they were looking for people like Stephen Prince who were actually filmed looting, burning, and assaulting.
    - iofj 11y ago
      I would argue that it doesn't even matter, but I'll try to clarify my reading of the article. The example name they give is "an obvious case" (nevertheless giving a name like this of someone who isn't convicted is an egregious violation of due process). But here's the paragraph I'm talking about: > Soft-spoken and gentle-mannered, Constable Collins carries a baton and pepper spray, but no gun. His weapon is his memory: Facial recognition software managed to identify one suspect of the 4,000 captured by security cameras during the London riots. Constable Collins identified 180. Note the nice, round number. I wonder how that was established. Note that the sentence strongly implies that the only thing that makes these people suspect is being "captured by security cameras during the London riots". Those security cameras are pointed at streets, not shops, not office buildings, not private property, they couldn't have gotten a good look at the people who looted and burned. This footage is very low quality: grainy 640x400 or less (cheap image sensors from around 2008, also the common resolution of the example images) black-and-white filmed in very bad lighting conditions at a distance of at least 6-7 meters (they hang those cameras up high), with most people on those cameras at at an average distance of 30 meters (my guess at half the distance between two of those security cameras from walking around in London). At that distance, a face is between 5x5 and 20x20 pixels. You can't tell me they have less than 10% error rate. And of course, the subject given is black, and all the police officers mentioned are white. I'm not even implying racism here, people are notoriously bad at identifying members of other ethnic groups correctly. Example of footage here[1]) And aside from the people who were right next to the police, I doubt there were many assaults at all, though I'd expect a few. But even if they do find the looters. They're not catching any reasonable percentage of them, they're just randomly punishing 4000 people : let's say they actually "catch" 2000 of them, and let's assume a 30% error rate (seems like the absolute minimum reasonable to me). So in effect, they're slapping jail on 660 innocents, and 1340 people who damaged property during a riot. Of the people who burned and looted, that 1340 is going to be, comparing with the numbers reported looting, somewhere between 2% and 5% of them. The point is that this is going to be very bad for the social situation in London, and not going to change the fact that there's a very high chance that you can loot and get away with it during riots. It's all the bad, with none of the good. [1] http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/criminalminds/images/7/76/July_7_bombers.JPG/revision/latest?cb=20130814183807 http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/criminalminds/images/7/7... http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/07/us-britain-bombings-idUSL0647701120070407 http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/07/us-britain-bombing... http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article5828360.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/Screen-Shot-2015-06-05-at-124049.png http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article5828360.ece/ALTERNATE...
pistoriusp 11y ago
"Constable Collins carries a baton and pepper spray, but no gun." Police in the UK aren't typically armed.
- EvilPopsicleDog 11y ago
  Exactly, this implied he'd elected not to carry a gun; most police in the UK that carry guns are special armed units.
chovietonline 11y ago
London Police ‘Super Recognizer’ i think it is correct !
funkysquid 11y ago
It's interesting that they don't mention how/if they're avoiding false positives. I don't doubt that some people have exceptional facial recognition skills, but if they're given a face they haven't seen before, how likely are they to match that face with someone they have seen? How do they know that someone wearing a mask on a security camera is enough information for him to actually make an accurate match? I'm worried this might be another case of police over estimating how effective something is (like hair DNA forensics) to make arrests, with innocent people paying for it.
- robk 11y ago
  This really does seem plausible to me. Create a parallel construction scenario and it seems a lot more public friendly when they abuse their powers.
  - paulsutter 11y ago
    You're really on to something with parallel construction. Using Palantir they can map all the celltower data, etc, to find people who are present at the place and time of multiple crimes. But they don't want to explain all this in court. So they sit Constable Collins down with the video footage to parallel reconstruct evidence for the jury. And the PR department then decides to turn him into a super-hero with mythical powers, to further the cover. That makes a lot more sense to me.
- omginternets 11y ago
  My first thought was to compare this to drug dogs in the US, who are trained and encouraged to render false positives as a means of delivering probable cause.
deleted 11y ago
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imaginenore 11y ago
I wonder how you can even convict just on some CCTV footage of a masked man. Do you just trust the "super recognizer"?
coldtea 11y ago
>Soft-spoken and gentle-mannered, Constable Collins carries a baton and pepper spray, but no gun. His weapon is his memory I don't like this journalistic BS trickery. That he doesn't carry a gun is not some unique trait of him as implied here. Most english policement DON'T carry guns (except in special units and circumstances) -- something that a lot of the US-based NYT readership wont know about.
- omginternets 11y ago
  If it makes you feel any better, damn-near everybody in the US knows that English policemen don't carry guns. It's pretty much the first thing people bring up when one mentions bobbies.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    In what circles of the society? Among hackers, university educated people, naturally curious, etc (and Pulp Fiction fans), sure. But there are vast expanses of the population who don't know even more basic stuff and I would argue those are the majority.

70 points by snewman 11y ago

lockes5hadow 11y ago

"Computers are no match for super recognizers..." Give it time.

methehack 11y ago
It's not really a competition. Yet. Anyway, I think you're missing the point. There's a great mystery here. How can the human mind do this? "Facial recognition software managed to identify one suspect of the 4,000 captured by security cameras during the London riots. Constable Collins identified 180". And dollars to donuts Constable Collins used a fraction of the energy too -- maybe even a just a donut's worth -- he is a copper after all.
- tedks 11y ago
  I'm sure his false positive rate is zero, and that he's never caused an innocent person to be arrested or imprisoned. After all, he's in the top 1% on a test designed by people from Harvard. Yes, Harvard. Thank the lord that once a policeman's fingered a known criminal, a jury will never disagree with them. I bet his conviction rate is stellar.
  - PepeGomez 11y ago
    I doubt they arrest somebody just based on that.
    - tedks 11y ago
      They named a person in the article based just on this police officer's word. He might never be able to get a job again if this article stays on the first page of google hits for his name. Who knows if he's the same person? Is there anything else it could be based on?
- lips 11y ago
  Indeed. My first thought was "Are tech companies trying to poach these folks in order to try and deconstruct what cues they're using, and/or to create a corpus of verified matches from low-quality source?"
- fauigerzigerk 11y ago
  > How can the human mind do this? I think the most interesting point about this is that the human mind doesn't know how the human mind does it. I wonder what kind of software they compared to Constable Collins. Did that software use designed features or learned features? What sort of data set was it trained on? It wouldn't surprise me if current state of the art software that learns features from real CCTV footage fared a lot better than what they were using in 2011.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

blazespin 11y ago

Super powers! That is so awesome.

TravisJamison 11y ago

"WITH its estimated one million security cameras, London is pioneering a new area of detection". - Insane, and scary.

iofj 11y ago
... and of course making the problem systematically worse. They explicitly state that they're after people who were filmed - just filmed - at the London riots a few years ago. They're looking to arrest them, and to extract damages from them. At those riots, absolute worst case 10-20% of people will have stolen or smashed things, with most just rallying for justice. But that doesn't even matter. The vast majority of those people aren't criminals, and even of the ones that did commit criminal acts during those riots 99% aren't "regular criminals" (meaning any more disrespectful of laws than a bad landlord is, day-to-day). But arresting these people will seriously impact their situation, their job, their prospects, and bring them a LOT closer to becoming criminals. And even the ones where it doesn't make them criminals, it will make them much more likely to riot again, for obvious reasons. This is stupid, dangerous, and merely meant to make a few people in power feel good about themselves.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  I may have missed it, but I didn't see where the article states that they were after people who were merely present. It implies that they were looking for people like Stephen Prince who were actually filmed looting, burning, and assaulting.
  - iofj 11y ago
    I would argue that it doesn't even matter, but I'll try to clarify my reading of the article. The example name they give is "an obvious case" (nevertheless giving a name like this of someone who isn't convicted is an egregious violation of due process). But here's the paragraph I'm talking about: > Soft-spoken and gentle-mannered, Constable Collins carries a baton and pepper spray, but no gun. His weapon is his memory: Facial recognition software managed to identify one suspect of the 4,000 captured by security cameras during the London riots. Constable Collins identified 180. Note the nice, round number. I wonder how that was established. Note that the sentence strongly implies that the only thing that makes these people suspect is being "captured by security cameras during the London riots". Those security cameras are pointed at streets, not shops, not office buildings, not private property, they couldn't have gotten a good look at the people who looted and burned. This footage is very low quality: grainy 640x400 or less (cheap image sensors from around 2008, also the common resolution of the example images) black-and-white filmed in very bad lighting conditions at a distance of at least 6-7 meters (they hang those cameras up high), with most people on those cameras at at an average distance of 30 meters (my guess at half the distance between two of those security cameras from walking around in London). At that distance, a face is between 5x5 and 20x20 pixels. You can't tell me they have less than 10% error rate. And of course, the subject given is black, and all the police officers mentioned are white. I'm not even implying racism here, people are notoriously bad at identifying members of other ethnic groups correctly. Example of footage here[1]) And aside from the people who were right next to the police, I doubt there were many assaults at all, though I'd expect a few. But even if they do find the looters. They're not catching any reasonable percentage of them, they're just randomly punishing 4000 people : let's say they actually "catch" 2000 of them, and let's assume a 30% error rate (seems like the absolute minimum reasonable to me). So in effect, they're slapping jail on 660 innocents, and 1340 people who damaged property during a riot. Of the people who burned and looted, that 1340 is going to be, comparing with the numbers reported looting, somewhere between 2% and 5% of them. The point is that this is going to be very bad for the social situation in London, and not going to change the fact that there's a very high chance that you can loot and get away with it during riots. It's all the bad, with none of the good. [1] http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/criminalminds/images/7/76/July_7_bombers.JPG/revision/latest?cb=20130814183807 http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/criminalminds/images/7/7... http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/07/us-britain-bombings-idUSL0647701120070407 http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/07/us-britain-bombing... http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article5828360.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/Screen-Shot-2015-06-05-at-124049.png http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article5828360.ece/ALTERNATE...

pistoriusp 11y ago

"Constable Collins carries a baton and pepper spray, but no gun." Police in the UK aren't typically armed.

EvilPopsicleDog 11y ago
Exactly, this implied he'd elected not to carry a gun; most police in the UK that carry guns are special armed units.

chovietonline 11y ago

London Police ‘Super Recognizer’ i think it is correct !

funkysquid 11y ago

It's interesting that they don't mention how/if they're avoiding false positives. I don't doubt that some people have exceptional facial recognition skills, but if they're given a face they haven't seen before, how likely are they to match that face with someone they have seen? How do they know that someone wearing a mask on a security camera is enough information for him to actually make an accurate match? I'm worried this might be another case of police over estimating how effective something is (like hair DNA forensics) to make arrests, with innocent people paying for it.

robk 11y ago
This really does seem plausible to me. Create a parallel construction scenario and it seems a lot more public friendly when they abuse their powers.
- paulsutter 11y ago
  You're really on to something with parallel construction. Using Palantir they can map all the celltower data, etc, to find people who are present at the place and time of multiple crimes. But they don't want to explain all this in court. So they sit Constable Collins down with the video footage to parallel reconstruct evidence for the jury. And the PR department then decides to turn him into a super-hero with mythical powers, to further the cover. That makes a lot more sense to me.
omginternets 11y ago
My first thought was to compare this to drug dogs in the US, who are trained and encouraged to render false positives as a means of delivering probable cause.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

imaginenore 11y ago

I wonder how you can even convict just on some CCTV footage of a masked man. Do you just trust the "super recognizer"?

coldtea 11y ago

>Soft-spoken and gentle-mannered, Constable Collins carries a baton and pepper spray, but no gun. His weapon is his memory I don't like this journalistic BS trickery. That he doesn't carry a gun is not some unique trait of him as implied here. Most english policement DON'T carry guns (except in special units and circumstances) -- something that a lot of the US-based NYT readership wont know about.

omginternets 11y ago
If it makes you feel any better, damn-near everybody in the US knows that English policemen don't carry guns. It's pretty much the first thing people bring up when one mentions bobbies.
- coldtea 11y ago
  In what circles of the society? Among hackers, university educated people, naturally curious, etc (and Pulp Fiction fans), sure. But there are vast expanses of the population who don't know even more basic stuff and I would argue those are the majority.