Re:Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial rec...
by HWR_14 on Monday August 16, 2021 @12:04PM
(#28199615)
Yes. But the only reason they need to identify what is a face in the camera is as a step in facial recognition. It's not like the security cameras are adjusting their focus or exposure.
Re:Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial rec...
by kevinsundar on Monday August 16, 2021 @03:38PM
(#28201949)
Its just security theater as a theft deterrent. The idea is that if you see a screen with a green box around your face then you believe that they've got a good look at you and if you steal then they can use the images.
Walmart isn't investing money building networked cameras with the processing ability to perform facial recognition at scale in real time. It'd probably cost more money than paying employees to just watch people at the store exits.
Re:Many Americans not aware of being tracked with facial rec...
by HWR_14 on Monday August 16, 2021 @06:36PM
(#28203826)
It's entirely possible that they are only pretending to do facial recognition as theft deterrent.
They could also be recording the video and doing the facial recognition offline - the analytics aren't valuable in realtime.
The green box that you're describing is recognizing that _A_ face is in view of the camera. This is often used for properly adjusting focus, exposure, etc... I suppose you could call it "facial recognition", because that's exactly what it's doing. But it's fairly benign and passive. This technology exists in my DSLR cameras that have no network connection and do not save any facial data anywhere in the image.
But then there is facial recognition that knows who you are, it's connected to a network, and it logs where you go - and these back-end systems correlate this data with other data that's been collected about you. Systems that know who you are are what is generally meant when discussing "facial recognition".
This article doesn't say.