German federal police enrolled 200 commuters to test if they could use face recognition software to pick out suspects from a CCTV feed at a train station under real-world circumstances. The three systems tested (produced by Cognitec, Bosch and Cross Match) failed to recognize 8 out of 10 people they should have, even when they were fed images of people standing still on an escalator, one of the favourite settings for this kind of biometrics. The key factor was the bad lighting conditions in the morning and afternoon, when most of the test suspects passed the cameras. (The test suspects were also fitted with RFID tags so they could be reliably identified by the test setting). Under the right conditions, the systems failed to recognize 4 out of 10 people, at a rate of 0.1 per cent of false alarms, which the researchers thought acceptable for practical police work. The final report [German, link below] recommends against using the systems for identification purposes. They would only be useful under constant lighting conditions, and either openly seeking cooperation of the persons being checked by the biometrics software, or making them cooperate involuntarily, by using what the report calls "eye-catchers", like changing billboards or marquees. The report states that three-dimensional face recognition, currently being developed, could probably do better. Although the report points out that the systems tested are basically not usable yet, there is still a major flaw in the design: The researchers thought 23 false alarms per day would be acceptable. If you have 23 false alarms a day, and only one or two real suspects (probably hiding their faces behind a newspaper) crossing the cameras per week, I think you would stop to trust the system very soon. The final report (28 pages, german) is available here: http://www.bka.de/kriminalwissenschaften/fotofahndung/pdf/fotofahndung_absch... Martin Virtel, Redakteur Forschen & Entwickeln Fon: +49/40/319 90 469 Financial Times Deutschland GmbH & Co KG, Stubbenhuk 3, 20459 Hamburg; Amtsgericht Hamburg HRA 92810 http://www.ftd.de/forschung virtel.martin@ftd.de ------------------------------