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Chinese Researchers Invent New Police Car That Can Scan Faces
- jcyw 11y agooh wow. like a real time streetview monitoring the society?
- mc_manus 11y agoSeems like it, the captured photos (in 360 degrees) will be compared within milliseconds with the list of the wanted criminals in the central database. Even when the car is moving with 120 kmph.
- mikeash 11y agoWhat's the false positive rate? I have a feeling that the base rate fallacy is going to make this technology far too interesting.
- mc_manus 11y agoReally important question, but unfortunately the article doesn't mentions it. What do mention is that for a successful identification only the three-quarter of the face is needed.
- differentView 11y agoAny place that uses the death penalty as quickly and frequently as China isn't too concerned about false positives.
- superuser2 11y agoThe Chinese state can throw basically unlimited resources at dealing with false positives. Doesn't seem like a problem for them.
- avs733 11y agoNot exactly a technical answer... does the Chinese government really care? I ask because this is the type of thing that only enters a conversation when 'effectiveness'/'accuracy' becomes a discussion down the line. I doubt that China gives a s* frankly, which makes this even scarier...the data used to show it works will like be bad by design.
- ihsw 11y agoIt's a quantum leap in surveillance tech -- the latency for nation-wide tracking of individuals will be phenomenally reduced. HUMINT resources can be more effectively allocated and target acquisition times can be reduced. That said, the false positive rate is guaranteed to be high at first but the tech will be improved, furthermore the data will be correlated with other's rather than sole-sourced. Sure they won't mind if there's collateral damage, but it's useless if it wastes time and effort by leading to the wrong person too often.
- brador 11y agoWould this work just as well on western faces as asian faces?
- beachstartup 11y agoi don't know, are computers racist, or is that just a human thing?
- mikeash 11y agoComputers certainly can be racist when it comes to visual recognition tasks. Different races do look different, after all. For example, there have been several cases of face tracking software failing to detect black people.
- jessaustin 11y agoIn the case I think you're referencing, they were detected, just not as people. It's a bit of a cop-out just to say, "shucks, computers do the darnedest things!" Humans coded, tested, and deployed that service. They let something fall through the cracks, the awful implications of which detract quite a bit from all the good the service might ever accomplish.
- mikeash 11y agoThere are a bunch of different examples out there, just search for "face detection black people." In one example, Google Photos tagged a pair of unfortunate folks as gorillas. In another, HP had some webcams that tracked faces but couldn't track black people. Kinect had a similar problem. Nikon had a "did someone blink?" message that produced a lot of false positives with Asian people. My point isn't to excuse it, and indeed I'm not even trying to address the moral dimensions of it. My point is just that if this is a Chinese product developed for use in China, it's entirely possible that it won't work well on non-Asian faces without additional work.
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- fintler 11y agoMy Hungarian is a bit rusty. Do they actively scan faces? ... or is it an on-demand thing? If it's on-demand, police in the US have already been doing it for a while now: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/us/facial-recognition-software-moves-from-overseas-wars-to-local-police.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/us/facial-recognition-soft...
- mc_manus 11y agoThe article doesn't mention it directly, but it seems it will scan actively. Thanks for the info, the article says that the creating of a similar system is also in progress in the United Arab Emirates.
- MagnumOpus 11y agoIt is just a university research group presenting a development prototype for a police car - so it's not likely something that will be on the roads anytime soon (though the Hungarian article speculates that this would "come in handy for the september G20 meeting in Tsengdu and could be introduced there"). Their prototype can "automatically scan all faces in a sixty meter circle around the car" and be able to reconcile it with lists of suspects, even at speeds of 120km/h. It is also able to recognize and store all number plates visible around the cop car.
- pmalynin 11y agoThe Machine [1] is getting ever closer. [1] From Person of Interest.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lowglow 11y agoHot new style tips for the summer, y'all! https://cvdazzle.com/ https://cvdazzle.com/
- wehadfun 11y agoInteresting idea. But only art students and fashion models could where this.
- ma2rten 11y agoDoes this work with modern deep learning based face detection?
- therobot24 11y agoi'm pretty sure it only works against Viola-Jones
- ansgri 11y agoThe generalizing power of deep convolutional neural nets is much greater, but (1) it doesn't really matter if you don't have anything similar in your training dataset, and (0) CNNs are used for face _recognition_, and for it you still have to detect face first. And in detection, VJ is still king.
- therobot24 11y agoGranted my domain of knowledge is more aligned with the recognition side, i'm pretty sure Viola-Jones has been replaced as 'king' with more robust approaches to detection. Here is a paper published just last year in CVPR: http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2015/papers/Li_A_Convolutional_Neural_2015_CVPR_paper.pdf http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2015/pa...
- nyolfen 11y agojust wear a cold mask
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- exabrial 11y agoHeh, after living in China for 5 weeks in the zhejiang province, I think theyd be better off if the attached this to mopeds :D
- Shengbo 11y agoThere's an English article on WSJ.[1] [1]http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/03/26/chinese-researchers-invent-new-police-car-that-can-scan-criminals-faces/ http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/03/26/chinese-resear...
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- dang 11y agoThanks. We changed to that, minus the word "criminals" in the WSJ title; presumably the thing scans non-criminal faces as well. The submitted URL was http://24.hu/tech/2016/04/04/a-kinai-rendorautok-nemsokara-mar-arcokat-is-kepesek-lesznek-felismerni/ http://24.hu/tech/2016/04/04/a-kinai-rendorautok-nemsokara-m.... Submitters: please submit stories in English. Hungarian is a magnificent language from a magnificent language family, but HN is an English-language site.
- mc_manus 11y agoThank you for your kind clarification, will do in the future.
- Cypher 11y agoI've been working on an idea for a while, autonomous police cars. They'll spot a criminal, pick them up and drive them to jail. It could save billions!
- exabrial 11y agoah, self driving cars posing as uber rides?
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- giancarlostoro 11y ago"Get out of your car, we've got a free Uber ride for you"
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- psbp 11y agoSounds like my stupid (brilliant?) idea, an autonomous car lift. Travel under/around speeding or otherwise criminal drivers, travel at the same speed and pick the vehicle up (from the frame, not the wheels).
- frogpelt 11y agoThen what?
- pc86 11y agoCrush the car.
- Animats 11y ago"10:01 AM", by Alexander Malec, 1966. Same idea, but for flying cars. Reckless driver kills child pedestrian. Gets caught, grabbed in air by large police vehicle. Driver has disabled vehicle recorder. Backup vehicle recorder hidden in lug nut is played back. "At 11 am, James 'Poxie' Smith was vaporized."
- omarforgotpwd 11y agoYou can imagine a future where criminals need to get plastic surgery to avoid capture. Kind of like minority report
- gr3yh47 11y ago>You can imagine a future where criminals, journalists, and political dissidents need to get plastic surgery to avoid disappearance. ftfy
- kochthesecond 11y agoMy first thought as well :/
- mciancia 11y agoReminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hazuw0ghjXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hazuw0ghjXc
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- alkonaut 11y agoSurprised this isn't already a thing in production. Police cars have had automatic license plate detection coupled to databases of known stolen cars etc. for many years. Likewise cars have had pedestrian detection cameras for a few years. All the technical bits are there, and I can't imagine it would be a difficult issue legislation/privacy-wise.
- fludlight 11y ago> Szép világ lenne, de erre minden bizonnyal még több évtizedet kell várnunk. > (A beautiful world it would be, but we will have to wait decades.) It seems that the current generation of Hungarian journalists has forgotten the lessons of overzealous policing during the bad old days from the late 1930s to the early 1990s.
- agent008t 11y agoBut surely, if you're a criminal, then you'll probably take measures to ensure your face doesn't get scanned/recognized? So this is either a measure to intimidate law-abiding citizens into staying docile, or just a corruption scheme to appropriate the funds from the budget (subcontract the development of this technology to a corporation run by one of your friends).
- outside1234 11y agoIs this how the Burka comes into fashion worldwide? :)
- therobot24 11y agoprobably a niqab over a burka