Facial recognition systems "improve"

[IP] NIST rates facial recognition systems



"The three top-rated systems verified identities correctly 87 percent to 90 percent of the time with a false-alarm rate of 1 percent. When NIST specified a false-alarm rate of 0.1 percent, the success rate dropped to between 79 percent and 82 percent."

From the report itself:

"Typically, the watch list task is more difficult than the identification or verification tasks
alone. Figure 8 shows detection and identification rates for varying watch list sizes at a false alarm rate of 1%. For the best system using a watch list of 25 people, the detection and identification rate is 77%. Increasing the size watch list to 3,000 people, decreases the detection and identification rate to 56%."

This means that such systems would still result in fingering plenty of innocent people as terrorists.

A practical, statistical look at the civil rights implications of this problem, endemic to the NCIC database as well, can be found in the April 2003 Crypto-Gram

In related news, from an earlier Crypto-Gram:

"The SmartGate facial recognition trial at Sydney Airport has suffered
an embarrassing setback, when two Japanese visitors fooled the system
simply by swapping passports.
http://email.ni.com.au/Click?q=aa-gBTeQXUc2wTVl8iWEhuEcIDY"