Brazilian Cops Get Augmented Eyeglasses That Can Pick Guilty Faces Out of a Crowd

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-04/brazilian-cops-get-glasses-can-pick-guilty-faces-out-crowd

Brazilian Cops Get Augmented Eyeglasses That Can Pick Guilty Faces Out of a
Crowd

By Clay Dillow Posted 04.14.2011 at 1:54 pm 8 Comments

The Long Arm Gets Upgraded Eyes New law enforcement glasses can scan faces in
a crowd and cross reference them with photos in a criminal database. via
Wikimedia

Taking a page from Officer Alex Murphy, police officers in Brazil will soon
be adding a layer of cyborg tech to their law enforcement toolbox via glasses
rigged with facial recognition tech. The glasses, dubbed bRoboCopb glasses,
scan faces in a crowd and check them against a criminal database, and
officers in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo have already been through demos with
the technology.

At distances up to 50 yards, the glasses can reportedly scan 400 faces per
second, comparing 46,000 biometric points on a personbs face against a
database of terrorists and other criminals. If a match is made it is
indicated by a red light that appears within the glasses frame, allowing
police to zero in on those people with problematic pasts (or currently
questionable legal statuses) without having to put police and citizens
through the tedium of random ID checks.

As far as crowd security is concerned, itbs a pretty cool piece of technology
if it works as advertised. And Brazil is due to have some big crowds passing
through in the next few years. Aside from being an international tourist
destination year round, cops in Rio will have to secure both the World Cup in
2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016, and police there hope to have the
technology widely deployed by that point.