Vijayawada: A whole host of privacy concerns have not slowed down the development of facial recognition technology, according to AP's first computer scientist Prof Allam Appa Rao. Soon, computers will be able to recognise human faces without actually seeing them.
Researchers at institutes in UK and Germany are currently working on faceless facial recognition, he said, with new software that was designed to recognise people in images even if their faces were blurred or obscured. Instead of looking at the face per se, faceless facial recognition focuses on the head and body to identify a person.
After seeing a single unobscured photo, the software can recognise the individual with 70 per cent accuracy in blurred photos.
After seeing 10 unobscured photos this jumps to 92 per cent accuracy, he added. The Vijayawada Police Commissionerate has started using similar technology to nab the criminals and also to curtail their movements during mega festivals.
The new software, which the AP Police is aiming to use, will act in a more smart way by integrating the data of criminals across all the states to a common server, a senior officer said, adding that the power of the Internet, call web or cloud services would be utilised for more accuracy in the desired result.
Prof Appa Rao said that the School of Health Promotion at Arizona State University was using facial recognition software to help doctors better connect with their patients.
While stating the efforts of a clinical associate professor at the Arizona State University, the professor said that the software tracked 491 points on the human face and could then figure out which emotion the person was feeling. The police had to exert efforts to extract the best results from this technology.
