Surveillance and Constitutional Issues

Face Recognition Surveillance

Facial recognition surveillance refers to a computer driven application that automatically identifies an individual from his or her digital image by a comparison of particular facial features in a facial database and in the live image . The technology creates a template of people 's facial configurations , such as the lengths of their noses , and the angles of their jaws . It thereby functions like the other biometric technologies (e .g . iris scanning , that use biological features for the purposes of recognition . According to Visionics , a manufacturer of face recognition

surveillance technology , the technology is capable of finding human faces anywhere in the field of view and at any distance and it can continuously track them and crop them out of the scene matching the face against a watch list (Kautzer

While iris scanning and other kinds of biometric technologies are known to be far more accurate than face recognition surveillance , it is believed that the latter would be more widely accepted because it is least intrusive (Rutherford , 2001 . Unsurprisingly , therefore , facial recognition technology is known as the fastest growing biometric technology in our day . Law enforcement agencies and the military have been using the technology successfully for many years without the public being aware of it . Britain is known to use at least two hundred thousand video cameras for surveillance . Many of these cameras are being installed with the facial recognition surveillance technology today . Typically these systems use computers to monitor cameras that are looking for recognized criminals . As soon as the system is seen to identify a known criminal , the police are called (Jarvis

FACE RECOGNITION SURVEILLANCE

Page 2

There are numerous United States embassies around the world that are already using the face recognition technology to keep criminals from entering the country . The Israel-Palestine b control is similarly using the technology to reduce crime across the b (Jarvis . IQ Biometrix , established in 2001 , is a company providing help to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world with the FACESTM , which is a groundbreaking software tool allowing for the creation and recreation of billions of facial images , as well as their encoding cataloging and transmitting ' The technology incorporates a facial composite tool that the FBI and the CIA also use . The United States Department of Defense , the U .S . Navy , and various local as well as state police agencies have similarly opted for this groundbreaking system of facial recognition surveillance (IQ Biometrix , 2004

There was increased interest in face recognition surveillance following the terrorist attacks on the American soil on September 11 2001 . Although the Americans had viewed the face recognition technology with skepticism before the attacks , they became confident that widespread use of the new technology in security apart from public safety would be able to protect them from similar attacks in future Indeed , face recognition surveillance could play an important role in the prevention of tragedies . All the same , law enforcement agencies have discovered that in the areas covered by the new technology , no...