Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws
wired.com
wired.com
By way of context, the casinos where I live offer a service: You can ask them to add your face into their database and they'll try to prevent you from entering. They have good photos of hundreds of people in the database and surveillance cameras at the entrances, and at that scale they're said to be good at matching the faces of people entering against the database.
That matches surveillance-camera footage against hundreds of photos. The Iranians want to do it against tens of millions, and stricter requirements. When the casino computer claims a match, an employee politely asks the person for papers a few seconds after entering, so a largish number of false positives is acceptable.
The Iranians won't be able to do that, they won't have employees on the spot. They'll either have to tune the recognition much more strictly or have vast numbers of false negatives.
Maybe this is just the Iranian mullahs trying to scare the hoi polloi. Or maybe it's yet another security company knowingly selling a government an expensive solution that doesn't work.
Right, not just facial recognition, but hijab detection as well.
Matching many photos against many photos is the quadratic assignment from hell. If you use traits to sort people into 50 buckets, and you have 300 people in the database, you'll need to match each photo from the surveillance camera against six people in the database. If your database is the passport photos of the thirty million adult Iranian women, you'll need to match that surveillance photo against 600,000 passport photos of similar-looking women, photographed up to five years ago. Awful.
It probably still isn't easy. You will still have "unknown offenders" that are not matched, but that probably isn't a big deal as they are effectively a false-negative which probably isn't a major issue in this context.