The results are in from the biggest computer face-recognition contest to date. Everyone from government agencies to police forces are looking for software to track us in airports or spot us in CCTV images. But much of this technology is developed behind closed doors — how can we know if any of it really works?
Russia has fitted thousands of security cameras across Moscow with facial recognition technology that give police the ability to track criminals and terror suspects.
NtechLab is a bold Russian company that is at the forefront of the most talked about technology around, facial recognition.
Seemingly overnight, facial recognition has taken the world by storm. It’s being used in China for everything from marketing to surveillance. A selfie may soon replace your boarding pass at airports. The DMV is using it to keep roads safe.
Like many cities, Moscow has an enormous network of CCTV cameras, but unlike many cities, thousands of those cameras are now hooked up to a powerful facial recognition system that can track criminals (and trash collectors) wherever they go.
Moscow’s local government has formally announced the deployment of facial recognition technology on a «city-wide» network of CCTV cameras. The system has been undergoing tests for close to a year, but the city’s Department of Information Technology today revealed new details of the project, including its licensing agreement with Russian startup NtechLab for the facial recognition software itself.
FindFace started as a futuristic social technology for identifying strangers by scanning their faces with a smartphone camera. Two years later, the facial recognition technology is the best in the world (yep, even better than Google’s) and is being used for public safety, law enforcement and fraud prevention through cybersecurity. Of course, facial recognition has driven significant public controversy over the erosion of personal privacy and anonymity. People also worry that their personal biometric data could be stolen and used for nefarious purposes.
New emotion reading technology claims to stop agitated criminals and potential terrorists on the street before they act. A Russian firm has created software that can be embedded in CCTV cameras to track the age, gender, emotional state and identity of people and keep track of suspicious behaviour. If someone is feeling particularly stressed or angry the algorithms will flag it up with authorities who could intervene before anything happens. The company claims it can track the emotional state of a person from CCTV with more than 94 per cent accuracy.
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