Life Without a Mobile Phone?

I depend on my iPhone as much as the next person -- perhaps even more so.

While smartphones are enabling more and more people to access email and YouTube videos on-the-go, shop online while waiting in line and even check an account balance to ensure it's not overdrawn, Ericcson is confident that phones will soon be able to do much more.

Reported in an article on ZDNet this week, Ericsson's vice president of systems architecture, Håkan Djuphammar, recently predicted:

"A year from now, basically every new phone sold will have [near field communication]. It's a two-way, bio-directional RFID communication link that makes this device work as a tag or reader."

What does that mean? In basic terms, phones will become your go-to for even more basic tasks as we look forward into 2010 and beyond.

Keys? Check.

Credit card number? Check

Concert ticket? Check.

According to the article, "Djuphammar said credit card companies could make use of mobile user location data and IP mapping to ascertain whether a transaction is taking place in the vicinity of the official card holder, thereby judging whether the transaction is likely to be genuine or not."

While this may seem like a win-win for all parties involved, I'm still a bit wearisome about the potential havoc a lost phone may wreak on a customer. With such valuable information all stored in one small device, restrictions must be put in place to secure such data in the instance a phone is lost or stolen.

What's life without a mobile phone? Not sure I want to find out, particularly if Djuphammar's prediction becomes reality.

ePassports get Floating Heads

Here is the first video that I have seen of Samsung's new ePassport prototype. It features a small back-lit screen as part of the ID card that, in this case, can be seen displaying a semi-creepy floating head. Encoding of this kind or "3D" or multi-image biometric information would go a long way to eliminate problems like those recently seen at Manchester airport.



I want one.

Retail Crime Increases in 2009, According to Recent NRF Study

Interesting study out of the National Retail Federation today reporting that 92% of retailers were affected by organized retail crime (ORC or "mega-shoplifting") in the past year. This is 8% higher than last year, contributing to the estimated $30 billion that ORC costs retailers every year.

The survey included retailers across industries, from grocery to restaurants and department stores. Security executives from 115 organizations participated, with 73 percent claiming that retail crime activity has increased over 2008.

In an interview with Security Director News' Rhianna Daniels, Tod Cohen, vice president and deputy general counsel for government relations at eBay, had some interesting things to say on reasons behind the increase and why retailers are continuing to struggle to prevent basic retail theft, also arguing against the hypothesis that Web shopping has spurred theft:

"...faced with challenging economic times, some retail giants have made a number of decisions that they were aware would contribute to their theft losses, including cuts in loss prevention staff and tools, as well as major reductions in sales staff, who serve as a powerful deterrent to potential thieves. They also continue to have major problems in dealing with the number one cause of inventory shrinkage -- employee theft. Retailers that are truly serious about this problem must invest resources to attack the problem at its source."

Obviously, retailers have specific security needs and require video surveillance features specifically tailored to their individual concerns -- for example, people counting capabilities and sophisticated object tracking. These statistics reaffirm my belief that investment in intelligent searchable video surveillance tools is crucial for retailers seeking to more efficiently combat fraud and organized crime, and here at 3VR we are now offering such tools and capabilities on all of our SmartRecorders.

With the slow economy taking a toll on profits while spurring a spike in crime, there is no better time to invest in a solution that has the ability to integrate with critical retail systems like POS and access control, while greatly increasing visibility and control for security personnel.

For more info on our retail-specific features, go here. Also check out how Sammy's Woodfired Pizza is using 3VR to bolster its retail security, customer service and loss prevention capabilities.

Sitting Down with Rob Jenkins

I recently connected with Rob Jenkins, a lecturer at the University at Glasgow and leading authority of facial recognition technology in the UK, to pick his brain about different topics in facial recognition, namely airport security, the future of biometric technology and privacy/related concerns.

Rob had some very insightful, innovative answers to my questions, and I'm excited to share them with the growing IHF readership. Going forward, I'm hoping to have other thought leaders and readers contribute content and commentary to this blog, as I'd like to make this more of a forum for biometric, facial recognition and other technology discussions rather than a one-sided conversation. Feel free to make comments on any of the responses or questions, and I will be sure to address them!

Also, check out Rob's departmental Web site for selected publications on gaze perception and other facial identification topics. Very interesting stuff.

In response to Manchester Airport lowering their matching thresholds, The Telegraph quoted you saying that lowering the passport match level to 30 percent would make the system almost worthless. Another perspective is that the previous levels were causing horrendous queues and customer dissatisfaction. Is there a middle ground here?

There is certainly a middle ground in the sense that we can choose where to strike a balance between rejecting genuine matches and accepting false matches. But reducing either type of error generally increases the other, so it’s a trade-off. There is no ‘sweet spot’ where both types of error are reined in.

Despite the advanced nature of this technology, do you believe that there should still be a human element involved in security checks? If so, do you believe we will ever reach a point where this will no longer be necessary?

The main problem with referring the difficult cases to humans is that humans cannot do the task reliably either - even if we’re trained and experienced. Humans are fantastic at matching familiar faces, but our performance with unfamiliar faces is very poor. If we can somehow incorporate the benefits of familiarity into the technology, then it could be transformed.

Facial recognition technologies are popping up all over -- club entrances, bathroom faucets, online photo services, using cameras in lieu of passwords to access computers -- have they hit the tipping point? Is it only time before we use the technology to unlock our front doors and open our car trunks? What trajectory do you see it taking? Staying in security-based deployments, infiltrating everyday life or a balance between the two?

To some extent I think a tipping point is being ushered in, mostly by people who have something to sell. And it is an idea that some sectors are keen to buy into. So in that sense there is a lot of good will wishing the technology to work. I don’t find the gadget market especially troubling, provided that errors are of relatively little consequence. The real danger is in rushing to large-scale security deployments. For applications such as passport control or forensic face recognition the stakes can be much higher, and we know that the available technology is not yet up to the task.

In the same vein, has facial recognition reached a point where accuracy and reliability now line up with the media's expectations?

In my experience, identification errors tend not to go down well with the public. I often ask audiences how often they would be prepared to be the subject of a misidentification. The answers are in the order of once a decade, even when the imagined consequences are minor. That’s a tall order, given the number of identity checks that some proposals entail. It comes as something of a shock when these demands are compared against current capability. As far as media expectations are concerned, I think there has been a change in tone. Traditionally, the emphasis has been on the implications face recognition for privacy, with the unspoken assumption that it is reliable. These days there is more of an awareness that the technology simply is being phased in, whether it works or not. That changes the focus of the debate.

The "Big Brother" argument -- that citizens are losing their individual privacy rights due to increased public security efforts -- is always present in a discussion about surveillance. Is there a point at which facial recognition and biometric technology infringe on personal freedoms and the right to privacy? Is blurring faces enough? Are there places where surveillance should not be allowed?

I don’t think facial recognition and biometric technology necessarily infringe on privacy. It is certainly possible to imagine applications where privacy concerns don’t arise. However, for the security and surveillance applications that have been at the forefront of public discussion, the tension with privacy is fundamental. The whole purpose of identifying someone is to connect them with some other information, and the nature of that information is a major issue. We can think of face recognition as a key to identity. But focusing on the key tends to distract us from other questions, like What’s behind the lock? As more and more information is stored behind the lock, the reliability of the key becomes increasingly important. As does the question of who has access to the key.

The practice of blurring or pixellating faces to protect identity (as in Google Streetview) is often poorly informed. Although such manipulations can make it more difficult for observers to identify people, this is only the case when the observer is unfamiliar with the faces concerned. When the observer is familiar with the face, blurring or pixellating the image does surprisingly little to impede identification.

People have very different ideas about where surveillance should be allowed, and which places should be out of bounds. I don’t really foresee any wide agreement on the extent of coverage that is desirable or acceptable. The general trend is for rapid expansion, especially in the US and the UK, but my impression is that this trend is not driven by public demand.

The UK has over 4 million cameras -- that's one for every 14 people in the country and 200,000 in London alone. Chicago is working to improve its 'Virtual Shield' and include the entire metropolitan area in its surveillance grid to cut down crime. Yet, criminals still often get away with murder -- literally. Are expectations set too high? Are surveillance grids more of a scare tactic in preventing crime from happening rather than proactive in catching criminals in the act?

It has been known for some time that the unprecedented CCTV coverage in the UK has had little or no effect on crime rates. A recent Home Office report revealed that only 3% of crimes were solved using CCTV footage, and suggests that simple improvements to street lighting would be more effective. Part of the problem is that it is unrealistic for police to monitor CCTV footage on the scale that it is produced. But more importantly, little thought has gone into the use of CCTV evidence in court. It has only recently become clear how poor humans are at matching unfamiliar faces, even when the images are far higher quality than could be obtained from CCTV. We’ve already looked at machine performance in this context. Establishing a match that will stand up in court is very difficult indeed.

The deterrent argument is interesting because the figures imply little or no deterrent value in CCTV. The standard explanation for this is that people assume the cameras are not working, which is a reasonable inference to make if they are not reducing crime. However, I wonder if there is also a paradoxical effect of increasing coverage. After all, the more cameras there are, the less likely it is that any particular camera is being monitored.

3D Chip Company Creates Gesture Video Interface

I looked at this company, Canesta, and a competing company, 3DV, a few years back. (3DV was recently acquired by Microsoft.) Both companies use special 3D sensors to cleanly and perfectly track objects that are relatively close by. Unlike conventional video analytics that must use computationally expensive algorithms to track and extract objects from video feeds, these companies use rays of light to directly measure those object. The result is pretty cool. Here is what that looks like:



Canesta recently released the following demonstration of their technology tied into what looks like the user interface from Cooliris:



Microsoft also announced its own gesture control system called Project Natal at E3. The interface is no doubt based on the new technology they acquired from 3DV.

So, why am I writing about this here? Well, the mass production of these kinds of 3D sensors holds significant potential to shape and change the biometrics and video analytics industries as we know them. For instance, complicated algorithms designed to extract and identify faces from video might not be needed if the camera chip itself was already producing perfectly accurate measurements of the faces crossing it’s path. Similarly, 3D video cameras might obviate the need for expensive video analytic software.

For now, however, there is a problem with that prediction. The range of these sensors is just not quite long enough to be used in any kind of surveillance context. Today, one really needs to be standing quite close for the 3D analysis to work.

But, like all things in the world of technology...that will change.