Chinese Researchers Invent New Police Car That Can Scan Faces | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Researchers Invent New Police Car That Can Scan Faces

blogs.wsj.com

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Interesting idea. But only art students and fashion models could where this.

Does this work with modern deep learning based face detection?

i'm pretty sure it only works against Viola-Jones

The generalizing power of deep convolutional neural nets is much greater, but (1) it doesn't really matter if you don't have anything similar in your training dataset, and (0) CNNs are used for face _recognition_, and for it you still have to detect face first. And in detection, VJ is still king.

Granted my domain of knowledge is more aligned with the recognition side, i'm pretty sure Viola-Jones has been replaced as 'king' with more robust approaches to detection. Here is a paper published just last year in CVPR:

http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2015/pa...

just wear a cold mask

I'll buy one the next time I'm thinking of robbing a bank

I've been working on an idea for a while, autonomous police cars. They'll spot a criminal, pick them up and drive them to jail. It could save billions!

ah, self driving cars posing as uber rides?

"Get out of your car, we've got a free Uber ride for you"

Sounds like my stupid (brilliant?) idea, an autonomous car lift. Travel under/around speeding or otherwise criminal drivers, travel at the same speed and pick the vehicle up (from the frame, not the wheels).

Then what?

Crush the car.

"10:01 AM", by Alexander Malec, 1966. Same idea, but for flying cars.

Reckless driver kills child pedestrian. Gets caught, grabbed in air by large police vehicle. Driver has disabled vehicle recorder. Backup vehicle recorder hidden in lug nut is played back.

"At 11 am, James 'Poxie' Smith was vaporized."

"You have 30 seconds to comply"

I have this idea of making a human cyborg to cruise with the police car. We will call him CopRobot.

Why didn't you just call him RoboTop? /s

Autonomous sex worker robots. They'll spot a horny male or female, pick them up and service them. It could save billions!

My Hungarian is a bit rusty. Do they actively scan faces? ... or is it an on-demand thing?

If it's on-demand, police in the US have already been doing it for a while now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/us/facial-recognition-soft...

The article doesn't mention it directly, but it seems it will scan actively. Thanks for the info, the article says that the creating of a similar system is also in progress in the United Arab Emirates.

It is just a university research group presenting a development prototype for a police car - so it's not likely something that will be on the roads anytime soon (though the Hungarian article speculates that this would "come in handy for the september G20 meeting in Tsengdu and could be introduced there").

Their prototype can "automatically scan all faces in a sixty meter circle around the car" and be able to reconcile it with lists of suspects, even at speeds of 120km/h. It is also able to recognize and store all number plates visible around the cop car.

The Machine [1] is getting ever closer.

[1] From Person of Interest.

Is this how the Burka comes into fashion worldwide? :)

probably a niqab over a burka

Surprised this isn't already a thing in production. Police cars have had automatic license plate detection coupled to databases of known stolen cars etc. for many years. Likewise cars have had pedestrian detection cameras for a few years.

All the technical bits are there, and I can't imagine it would be a difficult issue legislation/privacy-wise.

You can imagine a future where criminals need to get plastic surgery to avoid capture. Kind of like minority report

>You can imagine a future where criminals, journalists, and political dissidents need to get plastic surgery to avoid disappearance.

ftfy

My first thought as well :/

> Szép világ lenne, de erre minden bizonnyal még több évtizedet kell várnunk.

> (A beautiful world it would be, but we will have to wait decades.)

It seems that the current generation of Hungarian journalists has forgotten the lessons of overzealous policing during the bad old days from the late 1930s to the early 1990s.

Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hazuw0ghjXc

Heh, after living in China for 5 weeks in the zhejiang province, I think theyd be better off if the attached this to mopeds :D

oh wow. like a real time streetview monitoring the society?

Seems like it, the captured photos (in 360 degrees) will be compared within milliseconds with the list of the wanted criminals in the central database. Even when the car is moving with 120 kmph.

What's the false positive rate? I have a feeling that the base rate fallacy is going to make this technology far too interesting.

Really important question, but unfortunately the article doesn't mentions it. What do mention is that for a successful identification only the three-quarter of the face is needed.

The Chinese state can throw basically unlimited resources at dealing with false positives. Doesn't seem like a problem for them.

Not exactly a technical answer...

does the Chinese government really care? I ask because this is the type of thing that only enters a conversation when 'effectiveness'/'accuracy' becomes a discussion down the line. I doubt that China gives a s* frankly, which makes this even scarier...the data used to show it works will like be bad by design.

Any place that uses the death penalty as quickly and frequently as China isn't too concerned about false positives.

It's a quantum leap in surveillance tech -- the latency for nation-wide tracking of individuals will be phenomenally reduced. HUMINT resources can be more effectively allocated and target acquisition times can be reduced.

That said, the false positive rate is guaranteed to be high at first but the tech will be improved, furthermore the data will be correlated with other's rather than sole-sourced.

Sure they won't mind if there's collateral damage, but it's useless if it wastes time and effort by leading to the wrong person too often.

Would this work just as well on western faces as asian faces?

i don't know, are computers racist, or is that just a human thing?

Computers certainly can be racist when it comes to visual recognition tasks. Different races do look different, after all. For example, there have been several cases of face tracking software failing to detect black people.

In the case I think you're referencing, they were detected, just not as people.

It's a bit of a cop-out just to say, "shucks, computers do the darnedest things!" Humans coded, tested, and deployed that service. They let something fall through the cracks, the awful implications of which detract quite a bit from all the good the service might ever accomplish.

There are a bunch of different examples out there, just search for "face detection black people." In one example, Google Photos tagged a pair of unfortunate folks as gorillas. In another, HP had some webcams that tracked faces but couldn't track black people. Kinect had a similar problem. Nikon had a "did someone blink?" message that produced a lot of false positives with Asian people.

My point isn't to excuse it, and indeed I'm not even trying to address the moral dimensions of it. My point is just that if this is a Chinese product developed for use in China, it's entirely possible that it won't work well on non-Asian faces without additional work.

Sorry, you're right. I must have been aggressively misunderstanding in this case.

That's alright. I didn't know about the gorilla case until I went looking for it there, so that's something I learned.

Don't worry, anyone not looking Asian enough is automatically suspicious.

We published a paper on this a few years ago! Short answer: algorithms exhibit different accuracies on different races, genders, and ages.

B. F. Klare, M. J. Burge, J. C. Klontz, R. W. Vorder Bruegge and A. K. Jain, "Face Recognition Performance: Role of Demographic Information," in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 1789-1801, Dec. 2012.

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA556941

Someone has to program them.

There's an English article on WSJ.[1]

[1]http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/03/26/chinese-resear...

Thanks. We changed to that, minus the word "criminals" in the WSJ title; presumably the thing scans non-criminal faces as well.

The submitted URL was http://24.hu/tech/2016/04/04/a-kinai-rendorautok-nemsokara-m.... Submitters: please submit stories in English. Hungarian is a magnificent language from a magnificent language family, but HN is an English-language site.

Thank you for your kind clarification, will do in the future.

But surely, if you're a criminal, then you'll probably take measures to ensure your face doesn't get scanned/recognized? So this is either a measure to intimidate law-abiding citizens into staying docile, or just a corruption scheme to appropriate the funds from the budget (subcontract the development of this technology to a corporation run by one of your friends).

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