There is nothing new under the sun, despite the MIT Technology Review’s trumpeting of the “new way” to track people.
The underlying article is gated, but here is what the public summary says:
“Police and federal agencies have found a controversial new way to skirt the growing patchwork of laws that curb how they use facial recognition: an AI model that can track people based on attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories.
“The tool, called Track and built by the video analytics company Veritone, is used by 400 customers….”
Video analytics is nothing new. Viewing a picture of a particular backpack was a critical investigative lead after the Boston Marathon bombing. Two years later, I was adapting Morpho’s video analytics tool (now IDEMIA’s Augmented Vision) to U.S. use.
And it’s important to note that this is not strictly an IDENTIFICATION tool. Just because a tool finds someone with a particular body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories means nothing. Hundreds of people may share those same attributes.
But when you combine them with an INDIVIDUALIZATION tool such as facial recognition…only then can you uniquely identify someone. (Augmented Vision can do this.)
And if facial recognition itself is only useful as an investigative lead…then video analytics without facial recognition is also only useful as an investigative lead.
Yawn.
(Imagen 3)
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