Privacy-Enhancing Video Technology

It's great to see people trying to address the privacy vs. security question with new solutions instead of complaints on either side. Today, video surveillance is not particularly private nor effective, and we really need both. A new technology developed by researchers at the University of Toronto adds a sort of face blur filter to security video that can be reversed with a decryption key. So, the faces of the innocent remain fuzzy and out-of-focus, while investigators zero in on suspects.

The University of Toronto tech was most likely at least partially motivated by changes in Canadian privacy laws. Even without such laws, technology like this is important and certainly helps to address the privacy issue. At 3VR we are currently working on our own privacy enhancing technologies that also incorporate advanced facial recognition techniques. The technology helps to hide the faces of the innocent while at the same time identifying bad guys, providing a solution that gives equal weight to privacy and security, which is something I think should be at the center of any city surveillance deployment.

XID

I am a big fan of these guys. They use software to generate hundreds or thousands of 3D views of a person based on a single passport-style photo. Sometimes face recognition in access control has less than stellar performance because photos on surveillance don’t look like standard, front-lit passport photos. Government officials are preparing to use 3D technology like the stuff Facial Synthesis creates to turn their existing bad guy mug shot databases into watchlists that could be compared against less controlled photos, such as those from surveillance. This has huge implications both in terms of identifying suspects and in terms of clearing the innocent.

Check out this video for a primer on how XID's technology works.

Korea to Deploy National Face Rec System

This is a very interesting project in Korea:

Banking on Biometrics

IrisGuard Inc. announced today that its iris recognition has gone live at the ATMs of Cairo Amman Bank in Jordan. The bank has a network of 124 Automatic Teller Machines extending throughout Jordan and Palestine. Iris recognition at the ATMs enables the bank to register a customer by scanning their iris with IrisGuard's specially designed iris camera. Cairo Amman is the first bank in the world to roll out iris recognition technology on such a large scale.
The thing is, while iris recognition is accurate, it also invades privacy and requires the installation of new, very expensive cameras. Face recognition, on the other hand, can be deployed across existing camera networks for a fraction of the cost and without bank customers noticing any sort of change at all. It's cool technology, but is it an appropriate solution? I'm not sold.