How Well Can Algorithms Recognize Your Masked Face?
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:
How well can algorithms recognize your masked face?:
Facial-recognition experts say that algorithms are generally less accurate when a face is obscured, whether by an obstacle, a camera angle, or a mask, because there's less information available to make comparisons. "When you have fewer than 100,000 people in the database, you will not feel the difference," says Alexander Khanin, CEO and cofounder of VisionLabs, a startup based in Amsterdam. With 1 million people, he says, accuracy will be noticeably reduced and the system may need adjustment, depending on how it's being used.
[...] "We can identify a person wearing a balaclava, or a medical mask and a hat covering the forehead," says Artem Kuharenko, founder of NtechLab, a Russian company whose technology is deployed on 150,000 cameras in Moscow. He says that the company has experience with face masks through contracts in southeast Asia, where masks are worn to curb colds and flu. US Customs and Border Protection, which uses facial recognition on travelers boarding international flights at US airports, says its technology can identify masked faces.
But Anil Jain, a professor at Michigan State University who works on facial recognition and biometrics, says such claims can't be easily verified. "Companies can quote internal numbers, but we don't have a trusted database or evaluation to check that yet," says. "There's no third-party validation."
A US government lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that functions as the world's arbiter on the accuracy of facial-recognition algorithms hopes to provide that external validation-but is being held up by the same pandemic that prompted the project.
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