Tag IAFIS

Above photo credit: http://background-kid.com/blurred-people-background.html

Great, now there’s a new technology to get true clear pictures out of blurred CCTV images just when we learned last week that there are gadgets to hide one’s identity from the prying eyes of facial recognition programs like the FBI’s US$1 billion futuristic facial recognition program – the Next Generation Identification (NGI) System.

Fujitsu, the Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company, recently said it has invented a new, first of its kind image-processing technology that can detect people from low-resolution imagery and track people in security camera footage, even when the images are heavily blurred to protect privacy. See full story below.

Sad to say, this is probably the easiest, effective and most feasible solution:

Fujitsu tech can track heavily blurred people in security videos

By Tim Hornyak
IDG News Service | March 6, 2015

Fujitsu has developed image-processing technology that can be used to track people in security camera footage, even when the images are heavily blurred to protect their privacy.

Fujitsu Laboratories said its technology is the first of its kind that can detect people from low-resolution imagery in which faces are indistinguishable.

Detecting the movements of people could be useful for retail design, reducing pedestrian congestion in crowded urban areas or improving evacuation routes for emergencies, it said.

Fujitsu used computer-vision algorithms to analyze the imagery and identify the rough shapes, such as heads and torsos, that remain even if the image is heavily pixelated. The system can pick out multiple people in a frame, even if they overlap.

Using multiple camera sources, it can then determine if two given targets are the same person by focusing on the distinctive colors of a person’s clothing.

An indoor test of the system was able to track the paths of 80 percent of test subjects, according to the company. Further details of the trial were not immediately available.

“The technology could be used by a business owner when planning the layout of their next restaurant/shop,” a Fujitsu spokesman said via email. “It would also be used by the operators of a large sporting event during times of heavy foot traffic.”

People-tracking know-how has raised privacy concerns in Japan. Last year, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) was forced to delay and scale down a large, long-term face-recognition study it was planning to carry out at Osaka Station, one of the country’s busiest rail hubs.

The Fujitsu research is being presented to a conference of the Information Processing Society of Japan being held at Tohoku University in northern Japan. The company hopes to improve the accuracy of the system with an aim to commercializing it in the year ending March 31, 2016.

Fujitsu has also been developing retail-oriented technology such as sensors that follow a person’s gaze as he or she looks over merchandise as well as LED lights that can beam product information for smartphones.

Forget Google Glass, there’s something more fun and useful (picture above) but first, consider this picture below.

It may sounds like the Hollywood movie Matrix but let’s face it, everyone would sooner or later have their photos captured in the public space.

Consider for example, the FBI’s US$1 billion futuristic facial recognition program – the Next Generation Identification (NGI) System – was already up and running with the aim to capture photographs of every Americans and everyone on US soils.

The pictures above is an example of what the US government had collected of one individual – she filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see what was collected and the Department of Homeland Security subsequently released the data collected under the Global Entry Program.

But apart from immigration checkpoints, and potentially other files from other government departments (local and global), we are also subjected to the millions of CCTV cameras in public areas and the facial recognition programs scanning through the captured images (and also those on the internet and social networks).

So it’s good to know there may be a potential solution – though it’s still early days and it may not apply to cameras at immigration checkpoints.

The (computer) antivirus software company AVG is working on a “privacy glasses” project. These glasses (above) are designed to obfuscate your identity and prevent any facial recognition software from figuring out who you are, either by matching you with the pictures in their database or creating a new file of you for future use.

Find out more from this article below.