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When the FBI released the photos of the two suspects, I kept wondering, "Why do they need the publics help when I'm sure there is facial recognition software to

When the FBI released the photos of the two suspects, I kept wondering, "Why do they need the publics help when I'm sure there is facial recognition software to help match the suspects' faces?" Well I guess this article somewhat answers this, but I am still in disbelief that our government does not have better software. For how long it took to discover their names, the two suspects had TOO much time to escape. They had about 48 hours to book flights out of the country, flee to another part of the country, do more damage, etc. The lack of facial recognition software could have ultimately led to this case being unnecessarily longer. This is an issue that CAN and NEEDS to be fixed quickly--in fact, I hope the government is working on a more sophisticated facial recognition software right now. Ideally, the facial recognition software should be able to crawl through the web to search for faces. Now that I think about it, a good hacker could build a search engine that allows people to post photos and the program will run an automated search across the web (Social networks, Google, etc.) to see which pictures match it. Hell, Facebook even has facial recognition to some extent. A more sophisticated one cannot be that difficult for the government to build and put to use.

mjn 13y ago
There is a lot of money being put into facial recognition software by law enforcement and the military (including DARPA), so it's certainly the case that it's being worked on. But it's a hard problem, especially to do robustly at a large scale. What they do have is almost certainly the state of the art— in fact much of the current commercial state-of-the-art is itself based on stuff developed in older DARPA projects.
sp332 13y ago
Facebook only has to distinguish among friends of the uploader. And it's not perfect. This man was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. He would not have been identifiable out of the tens of thousands of people at the event, matched across the (probably) millions of people in the database.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Plus Facebook gets high resolution pictures of people's faces, and asks for confirmation. It doesn't get it right every time.
sy_r0y 13y ago
I get what you mean when you say these guys had way too much time to make some kind of an escape and I agree then that there is an absolute need for a much better software. Having said that, I do not think it would be wise for government to build and use an "image crawler" to search and store images of citizens...it would provoke widespread criticism concerning privacy of millions of citizens. On top of that in this particular instance, the police commissioner points out that "both Tsarnaevs’ images exist in official databases"..the software failed to make a match.
sehugg 13y ago
What's wrong with needing the public's help? The public did a great job in providing critical evidence. Maybe instead of more intrusive surveillance we find more ways for the public to participate. Maybe we uphold the public's right to take pictures and video in "sensitive areas". Etc.

mjn 13y ago

There is a lot of money being put into facial recognition software by law enforcement and the military (including DARPA), so it's certainly the case that it's being worked on. But it's a hard problem, especially to do robustly at a large scale. What they do have is almost certainly the state of the art— in fact much of the current commercial state-of-the-art is itself based on stuff developed in older DARPA projects.

sp332 13y ago

Facebook only has to distinguish among friends of the uploader. And it's not perfect. This man was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. He would not have been identifiable out of the tens of thousands of people at the event, matched across the (probably) millions of people in the database.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Plus Facebook gets high resolution pictures of people's faces, and asks for confirmation. It doesn't get it right every time.

sy_r0y 13y ago

I get what you mean when you say these guys had way too much time to make some kind of an escape and I agree then that there is an absolute need for a much better software. Having said that, I do not think it would be wise for government to build and use an "image crawler" to search and store images of citizens...it would provoke widespread criticism concerning privacy of millions of citizens. On top of that in this particular instance, the police commissioner points out that "both Tsarnaevs’ images exist in official databases"..the software failed to make a match.

sehugg 13y ago

What's wrong with needing the public's help? The public did a great job in providing critical evidence. Maybe instead of more intrusive surveillance we find more ways for the public to participate. Maybe we uphold the public's right to take pictures and video in "sensitive areas". Etc.