Face-Recognition Technology Improves

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Bill Stewart wrote:

> They're probably not independent, but they'll be influenced by lighting,
> precise viewing angles, etc., so they're probably nowhere near 100%
> correlated either.

I notice the systems mentioned in the study rely on biometrics extracted
from flat images. Recent crop of systems actually scan the face geometry
by using patterned light (apparently, cheaper than using a laser scanner),
resulting in a much richer and standartized (lighting and facial
orientation is irrelevant) biometric fingerprint.

There's a world of difference between a line of people each slowly
stepping through the gate past a sensor in roughly aligned orientation and
a fixed-orientation no-zoom low-resolution camera looking at a group of
freely behaving subjects at varying illumination.

Even with basically single-source nonintegrative biometrics one could do a
lot with hi-res camera with zoom actively tracking a single person at a
time, using a NIR (skin is far more transparent to IR, resulting in a far
richer pigmentation pattern fingerprint to be acquired) for illumination.
Then there's gait, a physical body model, etc. Shortwave SAR (SAR for THz
wavelenths seems to be doable according to recent publications), so
reading body geometry would appear possible.

Volatile MHC fragment chemosensors are being developed, a hi-tech variant 
of Stasi's approach with odor samples and canines. (Calibrated sensors, 
no need for sensor to be exponsed to the scent before, bit vectors never 
grow stale).

By using multichannel, integrative approaches and more sophisticated DSP 
the error rate can be eventually brought down arbitrarily low, and 
simultaneously become increasingly hard to falsify.

The costs will come down eventually for such integrative telebiometrics 
systems realtime connected via wireless to be blanket deployable. 

Unlike a mobile telephone, you can't switch your body off, or leave it at
home.

It will be interesting to see what will happen politically once the 
majority of voters will realize they're living in a strictly unilateral 
version of Brinworld.


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