Facial recognition in use after riots

LONDON (AP) — Facial recognition technology being considered for London's 2012 Games is getting a workout in the wake of Britain's riots, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Thursday, with rs feeding photographs of suspects through Scotland Yard's newly updated face-matching program.The official said that the Metropolitan Police's sophistied software was being used to help find those suspected of being involved in the worst unrest the force has faced in a eration, although he cautioned that police had a host of other strategies at their disposal."A lot of tools are being used to hunt down these criminals, and that's just one of them," the official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to spk about an ongoing investigation. "The issue is that you have to have a good picture of a suspect and it is only useful if you have something to match it against. In other words, the suspect alrdy has to have a previous criminal record."A press r with Scotland Yard — who also spoke anonymously, in line with force policy — confirmed Thursday that facial recognition technology was at the police's disposal, although he gave few other details. He said that erally the technology would only be used to help identify those suspected of serious crimes, such as assault, and that in most cases disseminating photographs to the eral public remains a far cer and more effective way of identifying people.

Chief Superintendent Simon Ovens, left, commander of the Westminster Burglary Squad,
and another r apprehend a suspect following a raid by police in an attempt to
recover property stolen during the recent civil disturbances.
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron promised vigorous and wide-ranging
msures to restore order and prevent riots erupting again on Britain's streets -
including taking gang-fighting tips from American cities.
Cameron told lawmakers there would be no "culture of fr" on Britain's streets,
as police raided houses to round up more suspects from four days of rioting and
looting in London and other English cities.
(AP Photo/Nigel Howard/Evening Standard, pool)
To that end the police have relsed two dozen photos and s to the picture-sharing website Flickr, where they've alrdy gathered some 400,000 hits. Some of those photographs have also been published by Britain's brash tabloid press. The Sun recently plastered them across its front page, along with a hdline urging rders to denounce looters to the police.The photographs on Flickr are mainly grainy s pulled from closed circuit television cameras, which may not be of much use to face-matching software. But other pictures — taken by police surveillance tms, published in the media or snapped by passers-by — could provide higher-resolution s.Both officials said that the quality of s would be .The facial-recognition technology used by police uses a face like a grid, msuring the distance between a person's nose, eyes, lips and other ftures. It has recently been upgraded, according to an article published last yr in Scotland Yard's internal publiion, "The Job."According to the March 2010 article, the new program has been shown to work far better than older versions of the face-matching technology. One expert cited by the article said it had shown promise in matching high-quality, face-on shots taken from surveillance photographs, mobile , pas or even off the Internet.A person with the Olympic planning committee recently told the AP that facial recognition software was being considered for use during the Olympic Games, although he would not go into details about the specific technology being used.He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of security preparations.
Source: APNewsBrk
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