Smile! UK cops reckon they've ironed out gremlins with real-time facial recog
- Reference: 1680796868
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/04/06/uk_police_facial_recognition/
- Source link:
The [1]report [PDF] from the National Physical Laboratory found that when face-match thresholds in [2]Neoface were set to 0.6 (the default setting), correct identification occurred 89 percent of the time someone walked into a recognition zone. False positive rates, per the report, were just 0.017 percent.
The NPL said the true positive identification rate showed no statistically significant deviations across gender and ethnic lines.
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"This is a significant report for policing as it is the first time we have had independent scientific evidence to advise us on the accuracy and any demographic differences of our Facial Recognition Technology," said Lindsey Chiswick, the Metropolitan Police's Director of Intelligence.
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"We know that at the setting we have been using it, the performance is the same across race and gender and the chance of a false match is just 1 in 6,000 people who pass the camera," Chiswick said, adding the study was large enough that demographic differences would have been seen.
If tweaked a bit more, say by upping the threshold to 0.64, the report said there weren't any false positives, while at 0.62 only a single false positive occurred during testing. Put a bit more slack on the line by moving it to below 0.6 and the system starts to exhibit "a statistically significant imbalance between demographics with more Black subjects having a false positive than Asian or White subjects," the NPL said.
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The report was commissioned in 2021 by the Metropolitan and South Wales Police in response to [7]widespread concerns over use of the technology. Alongside using it to catch crooks wandering through public spaces, the software was being tested as a way to [8]automatically debit children for the cost of school lunches, though that move was [9]put on hold not long after it was announced.
Better, but not great
In a 2020 [10]report [PDF] that looked at facial recognition technology used between 2016 and 2019 in the UK, the NPL reported that positive ID rates were just 72 percent, while false positives occurred 0.1 percent of the time, meaning one in 1,000 people who walked in front of a facial recognition camera would be falsely flagged as a potential criminal.
[11]NYPD blues: Cops ignored 93 percent of surveillance law rules
[12]US police have run nearly 1M Clearview AI searches, says founder
[13]Man wrongly jailed by facial recognition, lawyer claims
[14]Lab explores dystopian future of AI helping cops catch criminals
Things have definitely improved since then, but it's still not good enough, said Big Brother Watch's Legal and Policy Director Madeleine Stone.
"This report confirms that live facial recognition does have significant race and sex biases, but says that police can use settings to mitigate them. Given repeated findings of institutional racism and sexism within the police, forces should not be using such discriminatory technology at all," Stone [15]said .
The Met's Chiswick said her force understands concerns over bias, but the research shows they're not an issue. "This research means we better understand the performance of our algorithm. We understand how we can operate to ensure the performance across race and gender is equal," Chiswick said.
Racial and gender bias aside, Stone said a false positive rate of one in 6,000 is still unacceptable considering how many people would be scanned by such systems daily in large cities like London – tens of thousands of people across the UK could be forced to prove their innocence if it was rolled out nationally, the Big Brother Watch officer said.
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"Live facial recognition is [17]not referenced in a single UK law, has never been debated in Parliament, and is one of the most privacy-intrusive tools ever used in British policing. Parliament should urgently stop police from using this dangerously authoritarian surveillance tech," Stone said. ®
Get our [18]Tech Resources
[1] https://science.police.uk/site/assets/files/3396/frt-equitability-study_mar2023.pdf
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/30/nec_neoface_watch_afr_locate_details_liberty/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZC9BBu-VyW-hP7UfIwLbfQAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZC9BBu-VyW-hP7UfIwLbfQAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZC9BBu-VyW-hP7UfIwLbfQAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZC9BBu-VyW-hP7UfIwLbfQAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/21/uk_surveillance_commissioner_facial_recog_warning/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/18/give_us_your_biometric_data/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/26/uk_schools_canteen_facial_recog/
[10] https://www.met.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/central/services/accessing-information/facial-recognition/met-evaluation-report.pdf
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/31/nypd_surveillance_rules/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/28/us_police_clearview/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/03/facial_recognition_jail/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/08/in_brief_ai/
[15] https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/2023/04/bbw-responds-to-lfr-report/
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZC9BBu-VyW-hP7UfIwLbfQAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/19/uk_police_lack_framework_for/
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Probably all the Windrush arrivals who have been working for years now, plus their kids too.
Mission creep
In order to unlock your front door please look into the camera, so we can check if you need to pop in and see us while you are out.
Cheers, Big Bro.
Re: Mission creep
Yes that works fine for me, I always wear my anonymous mask ...
Welcome to the police state
We don't need to see your papers.
1 in 6000?
the chance of a false match is just 1 in 6,000 people who pass the camera
That's actually a pretty bad false match rate. A busy street in a retail district can average 5000 pedestrians per hour (or more) passing dozens of cameras. Seems like a lot of people can expect to have their day ruined by the polizei.
Re: 1 in 6000?
100% agreed. 1 in 6000 means DOZENS of false arrests daily. I'm only OK with this if the arresting officer and their supervisor also gets an arrest charge on their permanent record, for the same offence, for every single false arrest made.
Re: 1 in 6000?
Is that an improvement on the false positive rate of a real person doing stop-n-search?
Misdirection....yet again......................
Quote: "...improved accuracy and have fewer false positives..."
Wrong analysis about "accuracy"!!!!!!!
..... SHOULD THEY BE USING FACIAL RECOGNITION AT ALL??????????????????????
1 in 6000 is appalling. Clearly Blackstone's ratio has no meaning these days.
One would think that the bobbies would be busy enough without adding dozens of false arrests every day - after all, there are doughnuts to eat, and twitter doesn't police itself, especially these days.
It would be interesting to know how many correct matches the thing picks up, on average, in a day, and how many faces it tries to identify.
It would also be interesting to know how plod responds to a face being recognised. Presumably they would send an officer to the suspect's location. Do they then request identification, or just nick em on the spot? And how would that work in relation to PACE?
I would prefer a higher false positive rate
That way there is a better chance that the police will not trust the output and might verify by other means before doing anything unpleasant.
So who are the lucky 10'000 who're going to get collared by the false positives?