Washington police execute sketches with Amazon's facial recognition software

In a hitherto undocumented use of facial recognition software, the Washington State Police are using Amazon's "reconnaissance" to hunt down criminals with barely a sketch of the face. ;artist.

According to a Washington Post report, Washington County police are able to compare images of suspects collected in security cameras and eyewitness cell phone images with databases containing 300,000 photos of known criminals.

In the Washington County Police Department alone, the report states that more than 1,000 facial scanners were registered last year, which allowed for the identification of subjects, sometimes leading officers to home arrests.

Amazon's facial recognition software is used to deal with criminal sketches as part of an unprecedented deployment of technology in law enforcement. Photo file

While law enforcement officials say the software is an essential tool to speed up investigations and hunt down otherwise elusive criminals, skeptics claim that the use of facial recognition opens a Pandora's box of surveillance mbadive that could lead to more false identifications.

In some cases, says the report, the police perform the stage of carrying out sketches – renderings of artists based on eyewitness reports – hitherto undocumented, in the system in the US. hope to find a suspect.

This has particularly aroused the concern of experts, who claim that standards for the use of technology still have to make up for the reality and extent of its deployment.

When the images are mounted by the software, they are accompanied by a percentage of correspondence that indicates how much the A.I is confident. is the image of the entry is the suspect.

Amazon has recommended that law enforcement authorities only act when Rekognition is 99% convinced that the input image matches a documented documentary photo, but there is currently no official guidance on the persons with whom or on whom the data provided by the computer can be used. investigation.

Instead, agents have five matches for each search, regardless of the computer's confidence in its ability to identify the suspect.

Despite growing numbers of researchers, civil rights organizations, and even companies like Microsoft, one of the world's largest providers of advanced facial recognition software, technology has continued to find its place in the application of the law in the United States.

By badyzing the points on the face of a suspect, Rekognition is able to find potential matches in a database containing thousands of snapshots. Stock image

According to a 2016 study by Georgetown University's Center for Privacy and Technology of 4,000 local and local law enforcement agencies, 25 percent of respondents said they were able to to run or request facial badysis compared to a database.

In recent years, adoption rates have likely increased and, with Amazon's breakthrough on the ground, access could become easier – if it was not not blocked by law or by the board of directors of the company.

The board of directors of Amazon is due to vote on May 22 on the issue of whether to continue selling face recognition software to governments, while several legislatures of the country are at different stages of imposition of moratoriums on the use of technology by public bodies.

Among the most documented side effects of the use of facial recognition by law enforcement agencies is the possibility of disproportionately affecting minorities.

The software not only has a hard time reading darker faces, but has been designed especially for Caucasian men, making it more likely to make mistakes on other demographic data.

HOW DOES FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY WORK?

Facial recognition software works by matching images in real time to an earlier photograph of a person.

Each face has about 80 unique nodal points in the eyes, nose, cheeks and mouth that distinguish one person from another.

A digital video camera measures the distance between various points of the human face, such as the width of the nose, the depth of the eye sockets, the distance between the eyes and the shape of the jaw.

A different intelligent surveillance system (shown) that can scan 2 billion faces in seconds has been revealed in China. The system connects to millions of CCTV cameras and uses artificial intelligence to choose targets. The army is currently employing a version similar to this one with Amnesty International to follow people across the country.

This produces a unique numeric code that can then be badociated with a corresponding code extracted from a previous photo.

A facial recognition system used by the Chinese authorities connects to millions of CCTV cameras and uses artificial intelligence to choose targets.

Experts believe that facial recognition technology will soon exceed fingerprint technology as the most effective way to identify people.