Tampa using cameras to scan for wanted faces--

[Tim May]

At 3:09 PM +0200 7/5/01, Eugene Leitl wrote:
>On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, David Honig wrote:
>
>>  Parking tickets?  Go to the local cop/FBI site, download the
>>  *Wanted* pix, fab a mask, have fun.
>
>Hmm. It might work for the current generation of cams, but not for stuff
>which actually measures the face topography. And, of course, you can't
>hide the other biometrics. It seems, even plastic surgery has its limits.

The archives, or a search engine, will turn up many past discussions 
we've had of face recognition and biometrics.

One of the interesting things is that _ear shape_ is one of the best 
correlation features.

Of course, to measure ear shape the camera has to have a good view, 
unobscured and at close enough range to get a decent number of 
pixels.  (This makes sense, that ear shape would be a good metric. 
I've been noticing the variations in ear shapes since I heard about 
this scheme. Also, I can imagine the various conformal 
transformations--different angles of view, for example--preserve 
certain relationships well.)

I can believe some kind of automated face recognition is being done 
with points of entry, such as international airport arrival points, 
but I find it hard to swallow that "crowd shots" from overhead 
cameras can do anything meaningful.

The Tampa action may be mostly social engineering: "We're watching you!"

--Tim May


-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns