Where You Will See Facial Recognition Biometrics

Probably the best-known use of facial biometrics was at the 2001 Super bowl in
Tampa Bay, Florida. The idea was that the Super Bowl was a high-profile target
for terrorist attacks — and if officials were to capture images of 100,000 people
as they walked through turnstiles and other checkpoints, then they could use

 facial biometrics to compare those images to a database of known criminals —

and, in the event of a positive match, arrest them before they could start doing
anything harmful.

Privacy advocates raised alarms at the idea of monitoring and identifying
100,000 private citizens without their knowledge or permission, but it turns
out that both sides kind of had the wrong idea. Privacy folks didn’t mention
that to be recognized (identified) by any biometric system, you must first be
enrolled — that is, your biometric information would already have to be
stored in the system. 99.9 percent of the people entering the stadium were
not enrolled anywhere, much less in a criminal database so their privacy was
relatively unharmed. The officials needed to remember that under those capture
conditions, you’re lucky to authenticate a known face; actual identification
is very difficult.

A live test of facial recognition at Palm Beach International Airport in 2002
failed to match volunteer employees (who had been enrolled in the system)
about 53 percent of the time. Problems cited included eyeglasses, imaging
angle, subject movement, and lighting. In a test that included 5,000 passengers
and a database of 250 photographs, the system raised false alarms about
two or three times an hour — and failed to identify anyone correctly.

Facial recognition is at its best in controlled conditions when comparing images
taken under identical conditions. Although that sounds pretty restrictive, it’s
commonly used by law enforcement to compare mug shots to pictures acquired
for this purpose — and, in some cases, to compare ID photographs from passports
or driver’s licenses to samples gathered in controlled conditions.