I wonder if someone could find Bin Laden with these…
Brazilian police will use futuristic ‘Robocop-style’ glasses fitted with facial recognition equipment to identify and root out troublemakers at the 2014 World Cup. A small camera fitted to the glasses can capture 400 facial images per second and send them to a central computer database storing up to 13 million faces.
The system can compare biometric data at 46,000 points on a face and will immediately signal any matches to known criminals or people wanted by police. If there is a match a red signal will appear on a small screen connected to the glasses, alerting the police officer of the need to take further action or make an arrest.
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The camera will generally be used to scan faces in crowds up to 50 metres (164ft) away but can be adjusted, if searching for a specific target, to recognise faces as far as 12 miles away.
Chuck,
Re #25, if the data points correspond to pixels in the image, then there isn’t an issue with capture. Since anything that I ever knew about vector calculations has long since disappeared from my brain, I can’t speak to the ability of a system to perform such calculations.
Chuck said: “Facial recognition and searching a 13 million face database is not something that can be done in a few seconds.”
Pull your head out chuck. It can and *is* being done in a few seconds. How do I know? Because I personally paired the programmer who developed this system with the company deploying the system at the Brazil airport.
Chuck also said: “13 million faces x 46,000 data points, that’s 598 billion records. Is there a database system that exists which can handle that many records?”
I see. You can’t comprehend large numbers, so therefore such systems can’t exist. I’m not sure how large each data point is in a record, but I’m pretty confident all 598 billion would fit on a hand full of 2TB drives. Multiply that idea times the number of drives Google uses, or the three credit reporting companies, or the NSA.
In the grand scheme of things, these facial databases are small.
Yankinwaoz said: “I have a feeling that the US taxpayers are going to end up covering the cost of this system for Brazil, using national security as an excuse.”
WTF!? A ‘feeling’? Your statement has no basis in reality. The Brazilian government has more than enough money to cover the cost of this system. It’s barely in the millions.
msbpodcast: You and John E. Bredehoft seem to have the only thing of value to say here. Sad. I used to love this site, but rarely visit because of the poor quality of the comments.
As for the articles claims about glasses and the ability to detect faces at great distances, those sound like BS. My friends company does have both Blackberry and Android clients for their system, but cameras on such devices must manually activated.