I work at TASER/Axon, the company asserted to have this technology. This article, which appeared on the front page of the Drudge report this morning, is extremely disingenuous.<p>They have repackaged a press release that announced our investments in computer vision and machine learning and have made a huge leap that we have built or are currently building facial recognition into our cameras. This is false.<p>We believe that AI has the potential to streamline police work and reduce inefficiency. Police officers spend a substantial amount of time (65% according to a Netherlands study) doing administrative tasks like report writing and filling out forms. Our goal is to reduce this wasted time so that officers can spend more time in the street and with their communities.<p>If this sounds interesting, we're hiring! Come join our team in Seattle and write code that saves lives.
The title of the article is misleading. The article actually states that Taser's cameras do not have facial recognition. They use face detection to blur and redact faces from footage captured by body cameras. And far from real time they say that they hope to take that redaction process that takes eight hours to 1.5 hours for an hour video clip.
14 years ago I told my teacher at a very respected uni that real-time facial recognition would surely be used by gov for security.<p>He said I was insane and that this would be extremely hard to implement and it was very improbable that it would ever happen. He basically demoralized me in front of my colleagues.<p>Needless to say he failed to convince otherwise and I lost all respect for him.
Per the comments noting that this (police-mounted face recognition) isn't a thing:<p>I'm amazed that pervasive face recognition <i>isn't</i> a thing. I figured it would be the killer app for Google Glass, popping up notes about everyone you see. Apple & Facebook could leverage it from the face tagging in Photos & FB. Police could be well-served by a vest-mounted lightweight system giving likely identifications of encountered suspects (or anyone) from mugshots et al. Thing is, all the technology is there waiting for use; it's a killer app just waiting for society to put up with it (just like privacy invasions that were intolerable back when and are normal today).<p>(I'm not necessarily <i>advocating</i> it, just figuring it's inevitable and ready to explode onto the scene.)
Facial Recognition - This is who person is based on this face<p>Facial Detection - This part of image is a face<p>The article is referring to facial detection and object classification and not, as is mentioned, facial recognition. Also, it would certainly NOT be real time. Computers are still quite poor at this even if they take a super long amount of time and processing power.