REAL LIFE NEWS: COPS USE FACIAL RECOGNITION TO IDENTIFY CRIMINAL’S RELATIVES
by Hazed
It’s a common sight on TV cop dramas: police have a photograph of a criminal, maybe taken from CCTV footage, and they run it through the police database so that facial recognition software can check for a match.
Now British police have come up with a twist: using facial identification software to identify someone who isn’t in the database – but whose relatives are.
Leicestershire police force is using a new system called NeoFace, running a six-month trial, and other police forces in the country and abroad are watching with interest.
This all came to light when a police spokesman explained that the system had allowed them to finger a shoplifting suspect due to his resemblance to his criminal relatives. NeoFace compares the features of a suspect to those in the database and instead of looking for perfect matches, searches out similarities. The resulting matches are not enough evidence to use in court, but they can certainly be a help to officers investigating a crime, who can then focus their attention on a particular person and use other methods of identification such as DNA checks to confirm (or otherwise) the suspect’s guilt.
The spokesman explained, “The officer came in with CCTV images of a shoplifting suspect he didn’t recognise. We ran his image through the facial recognition system and his father and brother both popped up, because the family all have strong and shared facial characteristics.”
Apparently, the police are delighted with the new system, which has been used in 200 cases so far. However, it’s still “more of an art than it is a science” because some level of human operation is needed to check out the potential matches.
It sounds like a useful tool in identifying the “next generation” of criminal families, although I would be interested to know how many false positives it generates – that is, matches it finds that turn out not to be accurate. If there are too many it could be wasting police time as it sends them down the wrong path in their search for suspects.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/18/cops_new_facial_recog_system/
