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I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to tr

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an article about the UK doing this https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/04/uk-met-facial-recognition-failure-rate/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/04/uk-met-facial-recognitio... I can't find the hacker news link, but its worth a read.

lobotryas 7y ago
I would say that false positives are a feature. Like you mentioned it gives authorities cause to atop/investigate you. If they are wrong they have deniability. If they are right then mission accomplished!
- gbrown 7y ago
  Ouch, a punch right in the fourth ammendment.
- xmichael999 7y ago
  Yah, one only needs to use drug dogs as an example here. It is a known fact the dog can be triggered to claim a hit etc... and somehow in most states a dog doing "something" is sufficient justification to have your vehicle searched..
gbrown 7y ago
If I had to guess, they're paying a company tons of money for a crappy product that will make us all a bit less free, and will decrease the signal to noise ratio in actual investigation of wrongdoing. I'd also bet that there will be racial bias of one sort or another baked in, since the criminal justice system is heavily biased. Outcomes like "arrests" or "convictions" are poor proxies for crime, but good proxies for being brown or poor. As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of genetic data from ancestry type sites: they're catching white male offenders who weren't in the existing (racist) databases.
- verisimilitudes 7y ago
  Firstly, I had to have this website believe I was using it from the US before it would let me read the article. Secondly, it's for exactly these reasons that I find it awful and indefensible that I should be required to have a driver's license. Thirdly, this is why I have a single photograph and will be reusing it for as long as I can. >Though Utah, Vermont and Washington allow undocumented immigrants to obtain full driver’s licenses or more-limited permits known as driving privilege cards, ICE agents have run facial-recognition searches on those DMV databases. This doesn't seem like an issue, considering those wouldn't be US citizens. It's bad when it happens to US citizens. Only an idiot would enter a country illegally and then register with some of its systems, such as this. It's important to remember that one reason a country may allow lawlessness, violence, or unchecked immigration is to then demand stricter laws and security measures to the problem it created. Now, to respond to your comment: >As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of genetic data from ancestry type sites: they're catching white male offenders who weren't in the existing (racist) databases. You complain about ''racial bias'', yet then write that. Would it be biased to start pointing out crime statistics and how only a few white people have been caught by such a system? Tell me how you think this reads: As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of security camera data from businesses: they're catching black male offenders who could blend into the crowd. Do you like that?
rolltiide 7y ago
> Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. Oh you know its both
trevyn 7y ago
[deleted]
- xmichael999 7y ago
  I read the summary, and I don't agree. The tests being done are used under special circumstances. No way a camera mounted 12 or 14 feet up at an angle is going to provide the same type of results as youtube videos which are at a flat angle. There are simply too many "angle" like issues that will result in the accuracy being quite poor.
option 7y ago
modern data augmentation techniques can be very effective especially when fine-tuning already pretrained model. But still very much work in progress
bko 7y ago
A single picture is surprisingly effective in recognizing that person in another photo. I've been playing around with a python wrapper on dlib's facial recognition [0] and it's astonishing how it can identify people from just one photo. It's not like other machine learning methods that include training a classifier or even fine tuning a classifier. It works by encoding the persons face to a 128 dimension vector and then using that for comparison. The accuracy from most methods is between 99.2% - 99.8%, but the problem is that the training samples are too easy and controlled. It's sensitive to lighting. Google's most recent paper [1] on Facenet found 99.63% on the easy Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, and an impressive 95.12% on the Youtube faces dataset, presumably a much more difficult dataset. [0] https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03832 https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03832
- ma2rten 7y ago
  Accuracy depends on the dataset like you point out. It's a hard task to find a person among all driver license photos in the US.
  - sunebeck 7y ago
    Anecdotally, FindFace found my Russian friend's VK.com profile (amongst many millions of such profiles) as the number one hit after I took a picture of her in a bar and submitted it to their face recognition service.
    - digsy 7y ago
      I think your example is different to this scenario as your friend will have submitted many pics to VK so they have decent training set for her face. Whereas the DMV only has 1 picture of a suspect so it will result in more false positives.
- Scaevolus 7y ago
  dlib's face recognition is unsuitable for large-scale (a million faces) or single-reference recognition tasks.
IIAOPSW 7y ago
>or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. We already have this. Look up the false positive rate of drug sniffing dogs.
- sathackr 7y ago
  This. Easiest way to circumvent the 4th amendment. Get the dog to bark.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Yup. Basically, it's Clever Hans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans) weaponized against the populace. Doesn't even have to be conscious on the part of the handler.
fromthestart 7y ago
You train the neural net to encode landmarks which are unique to individual faces. Such a net, when trained, can extract the unique facial features from a single image and embed them in a vector to be compared to features extracted from other images. This is similar to how single images of faces can be animated with GANs now. https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08233v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08233v1
- xfitm3 7y ago
  Is this the same type of neural net that's powering "deepfakes"?
darpa_escapee 7y ago
> Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. You hit the nail on the head. Any system that hinders law enforcement’s assumptions and hunches will be touted as defective, anything that confirms those assumptions will be exalted. This is why narcotics dogs are used. Studies show that dogs will signal upon trainer instruction, and that dogs aren’t accurate nor precise in practice. Such dogs exist to establish probable cause, not to determine whether or not a suspect possesses narcotics.
- liberte82 7y ago
  It probably happens unconsciously a lot too, with no specific ill intent ... officer just has a "bad feeling" about a person and the dog detects the tension. Dogs are very sensitive to shifts in human emotion.
Spooky23 7y ago
I didn’t read the story carefully because of the paywall, but it depends on what the searches are doing and what the sources are. Several states have had success in identifying people with multiple drivers licenses using facial recognition systems on their photosets. Of course they are using DMV photos that are taken in a consistent way. FBI or ICE could very well have a feed of identification photos from foreign countries that are close enough to get good success.
lordgrenville 7y ago
This might be the HN thread you remembered https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20364523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20364523
adwww 7y ago
Don't you have to renew your driving license photo every few years? If the old photos are still on file, having multiple photos in the same style of a person a few years apart is actually probably quite a good training set.
- MertsA 7y ago
  My current driver's license photo is over a decade old and doesn't expire until 2023. At least when I renewed my license they didn't want to update the photo of me when I was 16 and just renewed it for 8 years. In theory I'll probably need to update my photo then, but as it is right now I look nothing like the photo on my driver's license.

lobotryas 7y ago

I would say that false positives are a feature. Like you mentioned it gives authorities cause to atop/investigate you. If they are wrong they have deniability. If they are right then mission accomplished!

gbrown 7y ago
Ouch, a punch right in the fourth ammendment.
xmichael999 7y ago
Yah, one only needs to use drug dogs as an example here. It is a known fact the dog can be triggered to claim a hit etc... and somehow in most states a dog doing "something" is sufficient justification to have your vehicle searched..

gbrown 7y ago

If I had to guess, they're paying a company tons of money for a crappy product that will make us all a bit less free, and will decrease the signal to noise ratio in actual investigation of wrongdoing. I'd also bet that there will be racial bias of one sort or another baked in, since the criminal justice system is heavily biased. Outcomes like "arrests" or "convictions" are poor proxies for crime, but good proxies for being brown or poor. As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of genetic data from ancestry type sites: they're catching white male offenders who weren't in the existing (racist) databases.

verisimilitudes 7y ago
Firstly, I had to have this website believe I was using it from the US before it would let me read the article. Secondly, it's for exactly these reasons that I find it awful and indefensible that I should be required to have a driver's license. Thirdly, this is why I have a single photograph and will be reusing it for as long as I can. >Though Utah, Vermont and Washington allow undocumented immigrants to obtain full driver’s licenses or more-limited permits known as driving privilege cards, ICE agents have run facial-recognition searches on those DMV databases. This doesn't seem like an issue, considering those wouldn't be US citizens. It's bad when it happens to US citizens. Only an idiot would enter a country illegally and then register with some of its systems, such as this. It's important to remember that one reason a country may allow lawlessness, violence, or unchecked immigration is to then demand stricter laws and security measures to the problem it created. Now, to respond to your comment: >As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of genetic data from ancestry type sites: they're catching white male offenders who weren't in the existing (racist) databases. You complain about ''racial bias'', yet then write that. Would it be biased to start pointing out crime statistics and how only a few white people have been caught by such a system? Tell me how you think this reads: As a side note, that's one of the things that I'm excited about with the use of security camera data from businesses: they're catching black male offenders who could blend into the crowd. Do you like that?

rolltiide 7y ago

trevyn 7y ago

[deleted]

xmichael999 7y ago
I read the summary, and I don't agree. The tests being done are used under special circumstances. No way a camera mounted 12 or 14 feet up at an angle is going to provide the same type of results as youtube videos which are at a flat angle. There are simply too many "angle" like issues that will result in the accuracy being quite poor.

option 7y ago

modern data augmentation techniques can be very effective especially when fine-tuning already pretrained model. But still very much work in progress

bko 7y ago

A single picture is surprisingly effective in recognizing that person in another photo. I've been playing around with a python wrapper on dlib's facial recognition [0] and it's astonishing how it can identify people from just one photo. It's not like other machine learning methods that include training a classifier or even fine tuning a classifier. It works by encoding the persons face to a 128 dimension vector and then using that for comparison. The accuracy from most methods is between 99.2% - 99.8%, but the problem is that the training samples are too easy and controlled. It's sensitive to lighting. Google's most recent paper [1] on Facenet found 99.63% on the easy Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, and an impressive 95.12% on the Youtube faces dataset, presumably a much more difficult dataset. [0] https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03832 https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03832

ma2rten 7y ago
Accuracy depends on the dataset like you point out. It's a hard task to find a person among all driver license photos in the US.
- sunebeck 7y ago
  Anecdotally, FindFace found my Russian friend's VK.com profile (amongst many millions of such profiles) as the number one hit after I took a picture of her in a bar and submitted it to their face recognition service.
  - digsy 7y ago
    I think your example is different to this scenario as your friend will have submitted many pics to VK so they have decent training set for her face. Whereas the DMV only has 1 picture of a suspect so it will result in more false positives.
Scaevolus 7y ago
dlib's face recognition is unsuitable for large-scale (a million faces) or single-reference recognition tasks.

IIAOPSW 7y ago

>or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. We already have this. Look up the false positive rate of drug sniffing dogs.

sathackr 7y ago
This. Easiest way to circumvent the 4th amendment. Get the dog to bark.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Yup. Basically, it's Clever Hans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans) weaponized against the populace. Doesn't even have to be conscious on the part of the handler.

fromthestart 7y ago

You train the neural net to encode landmarks which are unique to individual faces. Such a net, when trained, can extract the unique facial features from a single image and embed them in a vector to be compared to features extracted from other images. This is similar to how single images of faces can be animated with GANs now. https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08233v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08233v1

xfitm3 7y ago
Is this the same type of neural net that's powering "deepfakes"?

darpa_escapee 7y ago

> Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. You hit the nail on the head. Any system that hinders law enforcement’s assumptions and hunches will be touted as defective, anything that confirms those assumptions will be exalted. This is why narcotics dogs are used. Studies show that dogs will signal upon trainer instruction, and that dogs aren’t accurate nor precise in practice. Such dogs exist to establish probable cause, not to determine whether or not a suspect possesses narcotics.

liberte82 7y ago
It probably happens unconsciously a lot too, with no specific ill intent ... officer just has a "bad feeling" about a person and the dog detects the tension. Dogs are very sensitive to shifts in human emotion.

Spooky23 7y ago

I didn’t read the story carefully because of the paywall, but it depends on what the searches are doing and what the sources are. Several states have had success in identifying people with multiple drivers licenses using facial recognition systems on their photosets. Of course they are using DMV photos that are taken in a consistent way. FBI or ICE could very well have a feed of identification photos from foreign countries that are close enough to get good success.

lordgrenville 7y ago

This might be the HN thread you remembered https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20364523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20364523

adwww 7y ago

Don't you have to renew your driving license photo every few years? If the old photos are still on file, having multiple photos in the same style of a person a few years apart is actually probably quite a good training set.

MertsA 7y ago
My current driver's license photo is over a decade old and doesn't expire until 2023. At least when I renewed my license they didn't want to update the photo of me when I was 16 and just renewed it for 8 years. In theory I'll probably need to update my photo then, but as it is right now I look nothing like the photo on my driver's license.