Face Recognition Technology

This post is not exactly about a weird condition, but it is weird. One thing most people can do better than a computer is recognize a face. The technology is out there. According to an archived article in the UK Guardian, "some of Britain's 2.5 million CCTV cameras are being hooked up to facial recognition systems designed to identify known criminal." CCTV stands for closed-circuit television, which simply means that it does not broadcast publicly, and instead sends feeds to specific locations. The technology is mostly used for security -- an airport in Germany, Nevada casinos, and London's Borough of Newham's police CCTV, which attempts to identify convicted criminals from a database of mugshots. According to the Guardian article, Newham's automatic face recognition technology has failed to work even once, but it is supposed to work by measuring the peaks and valleys of the structure of a face and 

  "picks out a series of 'nodal points' and measures the distance between them. The distances between points are converted to a string of numbers which are then compared against the set of suspects' face numbers in the database. If there is an 80% chance of the match being right, the computer alerts an operator in the CCTV control room and displays the two facial images on screen for a human check. If the operator confirms that a suspect has been spotted, he contacts the police, who decide whether or not to take action. As few as 14 nodal points are enough for a good match."

According to a French technology website, face recognition uses mainly the following techniques:

 -- Facial geometry: uses geometrical characteristics of the face. May use several cameras to get better accuracy (2D, 3D...)

 -- Skin pattern recognition (Visual Skin Print)

 -- Facial thermogram: uses an infrared camera to map the face temperatures

 -- Smile: recognition of the wrinkle changes when smiling