Face-Recognition Technology Improves

[bear]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Eugen Leitl wrote:

>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.

The problem is that's exactly the sort of barrier that goes
away over time.  We face the inevitable advance of Moore's
Law.  The prices on those cameras are coming down, and the
prices of the media to store higher-res images (which plays
a major part in how much camera people decide is worth the
money) is coming down even more rapidly.  Face recognition
was something that was beyond our computing abilities for a
long time, but the systems are here now and we have to
decide how to deal with them - not on the basis of what they
are capable of this month, but on the basis of what kind of
society they enable in coming decades.

Also, face recognition is not like cryptography; you can't
make your face sixteen bits longer and stave off advances
in computer hardware for another five years.  These systems
are here now, and they're getting better.  Varied lighting,
varied perspective, moving faces, pixel counts, etc -- these
are all things that make the problem harder, but none of them
is going to put it out of reach for more than six months or
a year.  Five years from now those will be no barrier at
all, and the systems they have five years from now will be
deployed according to the decisions we make about such systems
now.

				Bear


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