There has been a lot of news lately about biometric scanning and no one is really making a connection with all this new technology… We are in the middle of a new system of identification which will control a person’s finances, travel, internet and much more! You will be tied to all your personal information by governments and corporations using this new system.. This system is super accurate and very high-tech, it will generate a unique ID for each person in the world! Forget Big Brother! This is way worse than anyone could have imagined.. At least in the Orwellian society you had the chance to get away!
They can generate this unique ID from a picture or even a video frame.. Age, beards, hair, hats or anything else has no effect on the accuracy of this system! You wont be able to get away from the cameras, because hiding your face will raise a lot of red flags.. This is happening now, many companies and governments are starting to implement this new technology in Airports, Police Stations, Military Bases, Banks and everywhere else where photo ID is required. Don’t forget every two years you have to take a new drivers licence photo so they will automatically be updating your unique ID to the database which will be used to identify you! Below is a lot of different articles which will give you some good information about this new technology which is violating our constitutional rights:
Most face recognition systems focus on specific features on the face and make a two-dimensional map of the face. Newer systems make three-dimensional maps. The systems capture facial images from video cameras and generate templates that are stored and used for comparisons. Face recognition is a fairly young technology compared with other biometrics like fingerprints.
One face recognition technology, referred to as local feature analysis, looks at specific parts of the face that do not change significantly over time, such as:
-Upper sections of eye sockets
-Area surrounding cheek bones
-Sides of mouth
-Distance between eyes.
Data such as the distance between the eyes, the length of the nose, or the angle of the chin contribute collectively to the template. A second method of face recognition is called the eigenface method. It looks at the face as a whole. A collection of face images is used to generate a two-dimensional gray-scale image to produce the biometric template.
Facial scans are only as good as the environment in which they are collected. The so-called mug-shot environment is ideal. The best scans are produced under controlled conditions with proper lighting and proper placement of the video device. As part of a highly sensitive security environment, there may be several cameras collecting image data from different angles, producing a more exact scan sample. Certain facial scanning applications also include tests for liveness, such as blinking eyes. Testing for liveness reduces the chance that the person requesting access is using a photograph of an authorized individual.
Facial recognition, like all biometrics, produces results based on probabilities. Once the live scan is performed and compared with the template database, positive identifications are produced according to the level of accuracy set in the system. If the system is set to accept only a match that is determined to be 100 percent accurate, with no margin of error, the rejection rate increases dramatically. As accuracy variables decrease below 100 percent, rejection rates decrease likewise. Facial recognition is generally subject to larger margins of error than more established biometrics, such as fingerprint recognition. Financial institutions considering the use of face recognition for customer authentication should carefully evaluate the adverse consequences of an unacceptably high FAR or FRR.
Facial scanning is considered one of the easiest biometrics to use. A portable web cam sitting on a desktop computer will suffice. The connecting system must be able to support the web cam and must be loaded with software to create the template and communicate with the authenticating system. The technique is nonintrusive, and user acceptance is typically high.
Identification and verification of a person’s identity are two generic application areas of face recognition systems. In identification applications, an algorithm identifies an unknown face in an image by searching through an electronic mugbook. In verification applications, an algorithm confirms the claimed identity of a particular face. Proposed applications have the potential to impact all aspects of everyday life by controlling access to physical and information facilities, confirming identities for legal and commercial transactions, and controlling the flow of citizens at borders. For face recognition systems to be successfully fielded, one has to be able to evaluate their performance. To evaluate an algorithm, its behavior is scored on a test set of matchable images in a mugbook known as the Gallery. One computes a similarity matrix that quantifies the proximities of images of a subset of the Gallery (called the Probe set) to each image in the Gallery.
Large collections of test images are already in existence (FERET/Army Research Lab/ George Mason Univ./93-96) or currently undergoing development (Human ID/DARPA/99-04). These databases (which include IR, still, video, and hyperspectral images of the face, gait, and iris of thousands of human subjects) provide the Human ID research community with de facto database standards for algorithm development and comparison.
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New Police Scanner Raises ‘Facial Profiling’ Concerns
Beginning this fall, police officers across the nation will have a new weapon holstered onto their belts: A small attachment that weighs about 12 ounces turns an ordinary iPhone into a state-of-the-art biometric scanner.
The device allows officers to scan a suspect’s irises or face, or his fingerprints, and instantly identify him. That capability is raising concerns with privacy advocates
“In a matter of seconds, it says here’s who it is, and here’s who it is not,” says Sean Mullin, CEO of BI2 Technologies, which developed the device.
The Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System, or MORIS, does not save the photo, but it keeps it just long enough to determine whether the suspect’s iris, which is more unique than a fingerprint, matches any in a national database of people who have been arrested before.
“This is a game changer for law enforcement,” says Pinal County, Ariz., Sheriff Paul Babeu. Babeu has signed up to buy 75 of the devices, which cost about $3,000 each.”I pushed people aside to be first in line to get these!” he says. “It’s worth its weight in gold.”
About 40 counties around the nation are set to receive about 1,000 of the devices beginning in September. Babeu says the gadgets will keep officers from getting fooled by criminals who are using increasingly high-quality fake IDs.
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Face recognition used in UK riots
Facial recognition technology being considered for London’s 2012 Games is getting a workout in the wake of Britain’s riots, with officers feeding photographs of suspects through Scotland Yard’s newly updated face-matching programme.
A law enforcement official tells The Associated Press that facial recognition is one of many tools police are using to hunt suspects still at large. Other techniques include posting head shots to photo-sharing site Flickr and old-fashioned public appeals.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about an ongoing investigation.
A spokesperson for Scotland Yard confirmed on Thursday that facial recognition technology was at his force’s disposal.
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Corporations Involved With Biometrics
Google’s foray into face recognition raises privacy concerns
Eric Schmidt and I have at least one thing in common: we both find facial recognition software creepy.
In an onstage interview at this year’s D9 conference , the executive chairman of Google said, “I’m very concerned personally about the union of mobile tracking and face recognition.”
He went on to explain that Google had actually developed facial-recognition software as part of its Google Goggles product but withheld the technology because of privacy concerns.
Imagine being able to identify a stranger simply by photographing them with your smartphone: up would pop their name, age, social networking profile. From a technical perspective, with modern face-recognition algorithms and a large enough database of faces, it’s entirely possible. It’s also creepy.
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Google reveals new face recognition technology
Google has bought a specialist face scanning technology company called Pitt Patt, which could well soon change the way we use the web in a fundamental way.
Pittsburgh-based Pitt Patt was founded in 2004 by a bunch of scientists from Carnegie Mellon University.
Pitt Patt’s tech can identify users from their faces and track the movement of people and objects in front of the webcam.
“We are happy to announce that Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition has been acquired by Google!” reads a notice on the company’s website this week.
“Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004. We’ve worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products.
“At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience.
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Facebook facial recognition software violates privacy laws, says Germany
Facebook is threatened with legal action in Germany over its facial recognition software, which critics say violates privacy and data protection laws.
The tool runs all photos uploaded to the social networking site through a programme and identifies the user’s friends on each picture. There was an outcry when it was rolled out in June to more than 500m members worldwide, though users can opt out of the automatic tagging, Facebook can still gather and store (indefinitely) all photos added to the site.
Now Hamburg’s data protection official has written to Facebook to demand it stops running the facial recognition programme on German users and deletes any related data. Johannes Caspar said the German authorities would take action if Facebook did not comply and could face fines of up to €300,000 (£262,000).
“Should Facebook maintain the function, it must ensure that only data from persons who have declared consent to the storage of their biometric facial profiles be stored in the database,” he said. The software offered potential for “considerable abuse” and was illegal.
It’s not the first time multinational technology firms have hit problems in Germany, which takes online privacy much more seriously than many other countries. In April, Google said it would not be collecting any more pictures for its German Street View project. The decision followed a series of objections after the mapping of 20 German cities for the service, which takes pictures of every street and property within a municipality. Germany’s privacy laws generally restrict photographs of people and property except in public places, such as a sporting event, without a person’s consent.
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Apple’s Face Recognition Plans For iOS5 To Make Smartphones Even Smarter
Way back in 2010, Apple spent some of its fast-amassing cash pile to buy Polar Rose, a face recognition firm from Sweden. Now it seems it’s been busy ever since incorporating Polar Rose’s face identification and tracking algorithms into iOS5–its upcoming revision of the operating system that powers iPhones and iPads. So deep is the integration–it’s far beyond a simple app–that there’re API handles.
This is huge news, for all the reasons that Google’s use of face recognition in its online offerings could change much about the web. By adding controls into iOS’ API, Apple’s allowing third-party apps to access the core face recognition tech. Code like “hasLeftEyePosition,” “mouthPosition” and the image-processing for identification means that apps can track faces and also recognize users.
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Apple to launch facial detection APIs with iOS 5
Apple is reportedly poised to introduce new facial detection APIs in conjunction with its forthcoming iOS 5 operating system revamp, enabling developers to incorporate user detection tools and features into their iOS applications.
9 to 5 Mac reports iOS 5 will integrate facial detection algorithms originally developed by Swedish startup Polar Rose, acquired by Apple in 2010. The APIs include CIFaceFeature, which determines where a user’s eyes and mouth are located, as well as CIDetector, an operating system resource that processes images to enable face detection. 9 to 5 Mac speculates Apple may also port Mac OS X’s Photo Booth face detection feature and corresponding visual and animation effects to the iPhone; Phone Booth is already available via iPad 2.
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Biometric Passports
What is an ePassport?
An ePassport is also known as a biometric passport. It looks like a traditional passport book, but it contains an electronic chip that is encoded with the same information found on page 2 of the passport (surname, given name, date of birth, place of birth and gender). It also includes a digital picture of the bearer’s face.
The addition of the electronic chip to the Canadian passport will increase security, provide greater protection against tampering and reduce the risk of fraud. The chip will enhance the current security features of the Canadian passport, which include holographic images and a hidden photo of the bearer that can only be viewed under ultraviolet light.
Source
Switzerland launches biometric passport
From March 1 biometric passports will be issued in Switzerland – containing a holder’s photograph and fingerprints – bringing the country into line with its neighbours.
The move was approved by a wafer-thin majority of voters last year amid scepticism over security. The Swiss abroad will be able to get their new passports from embassies and the document will allow visa-free entry into the United States.
“Switzerland is part of the Schengen area and is obliged to follow Schengen rules. It had until March 1 to issue biometric passports,” Markus Waldner, project leader for biometric passports at the Federal Police Office, told swissinfo.ch.
The country is one of the last to issue the e-passports or Passport 10, as they are known. France and Germany, for example, also members of the Schengen European single-border treaty, have employed the documents since 2006.
The project to implement the passports across the country has cost SFr29 million ($28 million) and has resulted in the equipping of around 40 special issuing centres across the country.
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Biometric Payments
FaceCash brings biometric payments to iPhones
A new application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod called FaceCash offers face recognition as a means of identity verification for mobile-based payments made at brick and mortar points of sale, according to an International Business Times New York article.
Essentially, what the FaceCash app enables a user to do is replace his credit cards or cash by linking the app with an account to pay for items at stores and have their phone scanned in lieu of a card or paying cash.
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Beyond Cell Phone Wallets, Biometrics Promise Truly Wallet-Free Future
Ever since Google announced that its Android phones would be equipped with a “digital wallet” that allows users to pay for things simply by touching their phone to a pad, interest in our wallet-free future has taken off. Long in use in Asia and especially Japan, the enabling technology, Near Field Communication, has allowed users to more or less completely replace credit cards with phones—yet the technology has languished in the U.S.
That delay has dragged on so long that at least one competing, not to mention superior, technology has reached maturity. Manufactured by Fujitsu under the trade name PalmSecure, it’s a system that requires no hardware on the user side. If you’ve got hands and you can wave them in front of a detector, you can use it to make purchases.
PalmSecure is a kind of identification / security scheme that falls under the umbrella of biometrics. Other biometric identifiers include your fingerprint, voice, iris, face, even the shape of your earlobe. Unlike those other measures, PalmSecure is uniquely unobtrusive. It’s literally the same gesture required to use an NFC phone wallet or to swipe a credit card, only you don’t have to have anything on your person to make it work.
The technology is affordable enough that one Florida school district is already deploying it in its cafeterias to allow students to make purchases. It’s also being used to identify patients in New York University’s Langone Medical Center, where 250 scanners have been deployed at a total system cost of $200,000.
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The above articles prove that our government along with corporations are trying to create a national system which is able to identify someone by using their unique features. I bet by 2012 this technology will be everywhere! This violates our rights as human-beings and nothing is going to stop it! Please do more digging online if you interested in finding our more information.. If you would like to add something send me an email at tips@usahitman.com