Beverley Head
Monday, 31 May 2010 09:22
IT Policy -
Government Tech Policy
Page 1 of 2
Facial recognition biometrics are increasingly being used by law enforcement agencies for lead generation – and the iFace system is about to be launched in Victoria for just that reason - but they are still some distance from being used as evidence in court according to leading experts speaking at the Biometrics Institute’s 11th Australian conference.
According to Richard Vorder Bruegge, a senior photographic technologist with the FBI, who delivered one of the keynote addresses at the conference which was held in Sydney last week; “We can use biometrics to develop leads, but forensics are what we need to take to court.”
Although facial recognition tools have improved considerably in recent years, there was still the chance of the technology failing to recognise a face, or recognising the wrong face he said. “If you are misidentified something very bad can happen to you. With facial recognition one in 1000 is inaccurate.
“You need to think what that means in a forensic setting. If there are 1000 different crimes, then ten times you will not find the person and one time the system will find the wrong person,” said Vorder Bruegge. “They sound like great statistics unless you are that one in 1000 people.”
He outlined how a Department of Motor Vehicle facial recognition system used in North Carolina had been harnessed to test the use of biometric identification by law enforcement agencies. “The State Law comes down to one sentence which says the face recognition system can be used for any law enforcement application,” said Vorder Bruegge.
He said that agents had trawled the DMV facial database which contained 30 million subjects looking for potential matches against 3,000 outstanding warrants. While that found 350 individuals through facial recognition matching, it missed a further 320 which were later identified by other means, demonstrating that the technology is far from infallible.
Vorder Bruegge also pointed to the challenges associated with commercial face recognition systems which are largely vendor specific. “When a major event happens we will not have the luxury of a single CCTV system – we will have to integrate different video systems,” he explained.
In Australia a number of agencies have been trialling facial recognition. Karen Shirley, a project manager with the Australian Federal Police outlined a trial the agency had begin in 2005 which found “facial recognition technology is useful for investigative and intelligence purposes”, especially in terms of its application as a tool for counter terrorism activities. But she acknowledged that for facial recognition systems to be useful agencies “have to get their ducks in a row,” in terms of making sure the technology, lighting, environment were conducive to collecting high quality and hence useful images.
