Unrest in England and Automatic Face Recognition

English youths are smashing shops, and the police can do nothing but study video from street surveillance cameras (well, the UK ranks first in the world in terms of the density of surveillance cameras). The police began to post photos of hooligans on Flickr and asked to identify the offenders. Citizens themselves also take photographs from the windows of houses, so a lot of pictures have already accumulated on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

And the work began. A group of London Riots Facial Recognition has been formed on Google Groups that discusses automatic face recognition technology for processing an array of photos from open sources. One developer offers his assistance in developing a program using Face.API . It turns out he or not, but over time, such technologies will certainly be created.

Thus, citizens themselves create tools that can be included in the standard arsenal of police bodies for automatic recognition of faces on street surveillance cameras.
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The technology can work approximately the same way as automatic video recording complexes of traffic violations are currently working. Radars and cameras hang over the road and automatically fix various violations of the rules (speeding, crossing a solid line of marking, parking in the wrong place). Then another camera records the state registration number on the car, it is recognized, it makes its way through the base - and a photo of the car and a receipt of the fine are sent to the owner’s home address. The system works almost completely automatically without human intervention. In the traffic police, accountants remain to work, who track the receipt of money from the public, and the engineers who install and configure new video recording complexes. Ideally, cameras should cover the entire territory of the city (for example, only in Moscow they are going to deliver 800 video recording complexes over the next three years ).

Of course, in the case of face recognition, automation will not reach such an extent, because the Criminal Code is much more complicated than traffic regulations, and face recognition is more difficult than recognition of state registration numbers. However, all technical problems can be solved with time, so that in the future the fixation of some violations of the Criminal Code and the Civil Code can also be automated. For example, smoking in a prohibited place, drinking alcohol in the street, using obscene language, throwing garbage on the pavement, not cleaning feces behind a dog, participating in an unauthorized rally, etc. All these minor violations can be fixed, automatically recognize the identity of the offender - and send a receipt of the fine at the place of residence. Thus, public order will be fully controlled by automatic systems, which is much more efficient than the work of lazy living police officers.

The worst thing in such systems is not even a violation of privacy, which most citizens do not care about, but inevitable mistakes. After all, facial recognition does not work as accurately as fingerprints. The victim of a mistake will be forced to prove his innocence , which is contrary to the principle of the presumption of innocence. As is the case with those photos of hooligans on the English streets, a person who lives nearby and went home or tried to escape from the hooligans can accidentally get into the frame. Yes, and the facial recognition system can also fail and take you for another person (although this problem is solved by automatically tracking a person with a chain of video cameras to your place of residence - just as the “Flow” system works for cars).

Anyone can become a victim of a mistake, but real hooligans will quickly learn to wear hoods and baseball caps with infrared flare of the face to shoot down video cameras.