Is the age of Minority Report here?

Well its a new year and I have made a commitment to write more blog posts this year. I always have these good ideas and great intentions to post but never seem to find the time..anyway enough of these excuses..

Minority Report..are we there yet?


I managed to have the privilege of getting involved with some very cool stuff towards  the end of last year and will continue to do this year. Its all around facial recognition technology.

The developments in this field have significant over the last few years but government organisations, with many competing priorities have opted for more let's say, conventional technological advances such as DNA testing and Records Management Systems (to store info about criminal records and immigration abuses for example). Nowadays though, attention is turning to facial recognition. I believe that its largely to do with the quality and price of cameras, one can buy a decent personal video camera with full HD recording for about $150 USD and that social media site you may have heard of called Facebook, urging us to tag friend based on facial recognition.


Not quite there yet..but almost...

Our governments don't quite have the Minority Report style user interfaces yet but they are starting to have the processing power similar to what you saw on the film. Take for example that we can now scan 500,000 images of persons of interest in less than half a second and return a positive result.

New infrared contour mapping improves accuracy and stops you wearing a fake bear

When you start to add known demographics to that image like of they are male or female and what age range they belong to the results shoot past the statistically significant line.

Facial recognition is not new as a concept, but bringing in live video streaming (like when Tom Cruise has his eyes read) facial recognition is closer than you think. Moves are already afoot to make static image recognition a moving target, no pun intended. This will mean that as we move around public spaces, our faces will automatically be matched against known persons of interest without us even knowing it. No worries for the majority of law abiders but very scary for those up to no good. Fake beards are not safe anymore either. The infrared part of technology will spot your fake face fungus in a heartbeat. Watch out bad people!

I am new to this field and will be engaging government organisations over the coming year, but what I have seen up to now is very cool and not that far from science fiction.