IP: Oh those damn false positives again -- More on biometric shortcomings:]

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Face recognition kit fails in Fla airport
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 27/05/2002 at 08:02 GMT

Palm Beach International Airport security workers would be racking up heaps
of overtime pay dealing with more than fifty false positives daily if their
bosses were to install Visionics' terror-busting face recognition gear, the
airport administrators have concluded.

The kit had been installed free of charge for a trial run during which the
airport, not surprisingly, decided to test it on volunteers who work there
over four weeks' time. Using fifteen volunteers and a data base of 250
snapshots, Palm Beach County administrators enjoyed a success rate of less
than fifty per cent. That is, more than half the people the system should
have flagged slipped past undetected.

The rate of false positives was also discouraging. The tests indicate that
over fifty people would be falsely pegged at a security checkpoint handling
five thousand passengers per day. The rate was approximately two to three
false alarms per hour per checkpoint. We hardly need elaborate on the mayhem
which would result from a gizmo that finds a terrorist every twenty minutes.
It would be impossible to get a single plane off the ground in such
circumstances. 

Eyeglasses gave the system a great deal of difficulty, in spite of copious
Visionics marketing hype denying this particular glitch. Small rotations of
the head, fifteen to thirty degrees off the camera's focal point, also
bamboozled it repeatedly, and the lighting had to be just right.

The ACLU obtained a copy of the Palm Beach report and has posted it here.

Meanwhile, the airport has since announced that it won't be adopting the
Visionics handy terrorist catcher after all. ®

------ Forwarded Message
From: Ben Laurie <ben () algroup co uk>
Date: Mon, 27 May 2002 14:43:46 +0100
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: [Fwd: More on biometric shortcomings:]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/25444.html
-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff


------ End of Forwarded Message

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