New facial recognition algorithm is so smart it doesn’t need to see your face

Facial recognition already posed serious problems for privacy advocates. Used by everyone from law enforcement to churches, the privacy concerns with facial recognition are very real, and they’re about to get a lot worse.

The ability to identify anyone just by analyzing an image of their face creates a severe imbalance of power from the common citizen to the people in charge. The ability to identify those whose faces are blurred or otherwise obstructed kills that balance entirely. Yet that’s exactly what algorithms like the ‘Faceless Recognition System’ (FRS) are aiming to do.

FRS was a creation by researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrücken, Germany. The idea was to create a method of identifying individuals through use of imperfect - blurry or otherwise obscured — images. The system trains a neural network on a set of photos containing obscured and unobscured images before using that training to spot similarities from a target’s head and body.

It’s crazy accurate too. The algorithm is able to find an obscured face after seeing an unobscured version of the same face only once at a 69.6 percent accuracy rate. If the machine has 10 images of the person’s face, the accuracy rate climbs to 91.5 percent.

There are, however, limitations. For example, black boxes obscuring a person’s face drop the accuracy rating down to about 14.7 percent, but even that is three times more accurate than humans.

It’s not just one algorithm, either. Facebook has its own facial recognition algorithms that can reportedly identify users with obscured faces at an 83 percent accuracy rate. To do so, it uses cues such as stance and body type. The Faceless Recognition system, however, might be the first fully trainable system that uses a full range of body cues to correctly identify targets.

Read More@ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/08/new-facial-recognition-algorithm-is-so-smart-it-doesnt-need-to-see-your-face/#gref

Technology: facial recognition to eye scans and thought control

You stare at a ceiling light and it switches on. The same applies when you stare at the coffee machine or focus your eyes on the button showing your preferred washing machine cycle. You refocus on the “on” button and away it goes.

Snapchat Suit May Influence Facial Recognition Technology Controversy

The lawsuit against Snapchat brought by two Illinois residents is making its way to federal court in California-and eventually may help address controversies about the use of facial recognition technology.

The lawsuit focuses on Snapchat’s “Lenses” feature and whether it conflicts with the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The plaintiffs say it does, but Snapchat contends it recognizes objects, not “a specific face.”

“Snapchat’s proprietary facial recognition technology scans a user’s face each time he or she uses Lenses to send a snap or story and collects, stores and uses geometric data relating to the unique points and contours (i.e. biometric identifiers of each face),” the lawsuit filed initially in Los Angeles Superior Court said.

Under BIPA, Snapchat or another company cannot obtain someone’s biometrics unless it informs the person in writing; receives a written release from the person who provides informed consent; and publishes guidelines for destroying biometric identifiers, with these guidelines being available to the public, according to the lawsuit.

But Snapchat never informed its users in Illinois about “the specific purpose and length of term for which their biometric identifiers or information would be collected, stored or used,” the lawsuit contends. Snapchat also did not get a written release or consent from these users, nor did the company have publically available guidelines on when the identifiers would be destroyed, the lawsuit adds.

It further claims that Snapchat has created, collected and stored tens of millions and maybe hundreds of millions of face templates, as it estimates that tens of thousands of Snapchat users live in Illinois. Snapchat creates the templates using “sophisticated facial recognition technology” that can extract and analyze data from the “points and contours of users’ faces when they use Snapchat’s Lenses feature,” according to the lawsuit.

Read More@http://www.law.com/sites/articles/2016/07/26/snapchat-suit-may-influence-facial-recognition-technology-controversy/?slreturn=20160627082736