South Wales Police facial recognition software boasts 8% success rate

The South Wales Police Force is defending the decision to trial NEC facial recognition software during last year’s Champions League Final as it is revealed only 8% of the identifications proved to be accurate.

The project was announced last year as the South Wales Police Force outlined plans to use NEC’s NeoFace Watch facial recognition software platform to increase the efficiency of police work during a weekend which saw 170,000 football fans in Cardiff. The promise of the technology was to identify persons of interest on pre-determined watchlists in real-time, with data being collected using CCTV cameras mounted on a number of police vehicles.

While the software was used at a number of different events in the capital, the Champions League Final got the most attention. As you can see from the table below, none of the results are particularly flattering for the South Wales Police or NEC, the firm which provided the technology to power the failed project, with the overall success rate just 9%

While it is completely understandable there will be flaws in trials and POCs, this demonstration of outright failure makes you question whether this software should have been released from the lab in the first place.

Governments around the world are seemingly becoming less trusting of their own citizens on a daily basis, meaning more intrusive and secretive means of monitoring individuals are likely to become more common. Politicians and spooks around the world must have been watching these trials with some interest, and such a catastrophic failure of the technology is a very worrying sign.

Technology companies like NEC will be under pressure to produce platforms such as NeoFace Watch as quickly as possible as governments continuously look to step up activities. This pressure might result in platforms being launched too early, before enough stress tests have been run. This would certainly seem to be the explanation here, though South Wales Police (and NEC presumably) has blamed poor images supplied by UEFA, Interpol and other partner agencies. That said, the following extract from the NEC website seems to contradict this statement:

“NEC NeoFace technology’s strength lies in its tolerance of poor quality. Highly compressed surveillance videos and images, previously considered of little to no value, are now usable evidence and leading to higher rates of positive identification. With its proven ability to match low resolution facial images, including images with resolutions down to just 24 pixels between the eyes, NEC’s NeoFace technology outperforms all other face recognition systems in matching accuracy.”

It does seem the world has accepted its fate when it comes to Big Brother and eyes in the skies, but companies like NEC need to step up the game. Such technologies are likely to play a role in the trials and potential convictions of individuals in the future, therefore accuracy needs to be as high as possible.