, Newsbytes 2002-05-16
Early results of face-recognition surveillance tests at Palm Beach International Airport suggest the technology is proving again to be unreliable, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said this week.
The civil rights group, a vociferous opponent of the technology that has figured prominently in national security planning since terrorist attacks in the U.S. last year, said the first four weeks of testing at the Palm Beach airport showed the technology was "less accurate than a coin toss."The ACLU said it used Florida's freedom-of-information law to obtain results of the airport's early testing of facial recognition technology, based on an image bank that included pictures of employees who had volunteered to participate.
A report detailing the first half of an eight-week trial showed that the system matched the faces of the volunteers just 455 out of 958 times, or about 47 percent of the time.
What's more, the ACLU said, the recognition rate went down when subjects were moving, wearing glasses, or turned their heads from the cameras.
Said the report: "Eyeglasses were problematic. Glare from ambient light and tinted lenses diminished the system's effectiveness."
The report cited a "substantial loss in matching" if the volunteers posed with a gaze 15 to 30 degrees away from a line of sight to the camera.
"It hardly takes a genius of disguise to trick this system," Randall Marshall, legal director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a prepared statement. "All a terrorist would have to do, it seems, is put on eyeglasses or turn his head a little to the side."
The report also said that the system required high-quality images to be loaded into its databases in order to be successful later in recognizing the faces of subjects.
"Even with recent, high quality photographs and subjects who were not trying to fool the system, the face-recognition technology was less accurate than a coin toss," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program of the national ACLU. "Under real world conditions, Osama Bin Laden himself could easily evade a face recognition system."
The tests involved surveillance of some 5,000 passengers and employees a day at the airport - and an average of 10,000 "face captures" a day - with comparisons being made to a database of 250 photographs.
Steinhardt said the system's false alarm rate - more than 1,000 over four weeks of testing - could worsen with a larger image database and scanning of more passengers.
"Once again, even in a pristine test using photographs of cooperative subjects taken under ideal conditions, face-recognition is a disaster," Steinhardt said. "We hope that Palm Beach County will recognize that this system is a waste of money and preserve scarce security resources for programs that will actually make us safer."
In the past, the ACLU has criticized facial recognition technology using results of tests conducted by law-enforcement authorities in Tampa, Fla.
In both cases, the technology is from Visionics Corp. [NASDAQ:VSNX], which said in February that it was merging with Identix Inc. [NASDAQ:IDNX], which specializes in biometric matching of fingerprints.
The ACLU has posted the Palm Beach report online here: http://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy/FaceRec_data.pdf .
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com .
