It has already been used at high-profile events, despite concerns about the privacy, accuracy and bias of this AI-driven system
REVIEW
Government ministers in the UK are pushing for the MET police to make use of automated facial recognition for routine law enforcement.
As police officers already wear body cameras, it would be possible to send the images they record directly to live facial recognition (LFR) systems. This would mean everyone the officers encounter could be instantly checked to see if they match the data of someone on a watchlist – a database of offenders wanted by the police and courts.
The technology has already been used for high-profile gatherings such as King Charles’s Coronation, but could rolling it out more widely lead to a rise in distrust of the police force due to concerns about accuracy and privacy?
WHAT IS LFR AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
Artificial intelligences (AIs) trained to perform facial recognition were one of the first types of practical machine learning systems developed by computer scientists.
They’re commonly used alongside ‘dot projector’ lasers, which can map thousands of points on a human face, to create the highly accurate biometric readers that we use to unlock our phones.
The LFR used by the police is much simpler. It relies on a camera to scan the surroundings and create a flat image. This image is then split into segments by the AI and the faces in it are mapped to find key features, such as distances between the eyes, noses and mouths, to build simple biometric records.
These records can then be compared to those stored in a database of known offenders using a neural network – a type of AI inspired by the human brain.
This method of using images alone is far less accurate than the laser-mapping method used by phones, however, as it doesn’t consider the three-dimensional shape of faces.
It also relies on the neural network to be able to match faces correctly. The AI has to be trained on enough examples of faces to enable it to distinguish properly between them. If the data it was trained on is biased towards certain types of faces, then the AI will be biased in its ability to classify faces.
WHAT IS LFR USED FOR AND WHAT IS ITS LEGAL STANDING?
LFR has been used in England and Wales for a number of events including protests, concerts, the Notting Hill Carnival and Remembrance Sunday, as well as on busy shopping streets such as Oxford Street in London.
While the UK government is pushing for increased use of this AI surveillance tech, many other countries, with the notable exception of China, are
