Facial Recognition Has Its Limits. Just Ask the ‘Super-Recognizers’
An elite police team in London with the ability to recognize thousands of different people is outperforming the technology — for now.
One of London’s eyes.
Photographer: Oli Scarff/Getty ImagesLondon is one of the most watched cities in the world: Its inhabitants are caught on camera about 300 times a day on average, and the British capital has become a testbed for police use of live facial recognition. But the technology, which powers a multibillion-dollar market for security firms and building management, has troubling limitations. To show it up even more, a special team of human officers have, anecdotally, been doing a better job than the cameras.
London’s Metropolitan Police conducted 10 trials of live facial recognition from 2016 to 2019, using face-matching software from Japanese technology firm NEC Corp. and cameras mounted on surveillance vans and poles. But the system made positive matches in just 19% of the cases, according to an independent study of the trials by the University of Essex. The majority of the time, the software was wrong.