Oralytics

Examples of using Machine Learning on Video and Photo in Public

Posted on May 22, 2019 Updated on May 18, 2019

Over the past 18 months or so most of the examples of using machine learning have been on looking at images and identifying objects in them. There are the typical examples of examining pictures looking for a Cat or a Dog, or some famous person, etc. Most of these examples are very noddy, although they do illustrate important examples.

But what if this same technology was used to monitor people going about their daily lives. What if pictures and/or video was captured of you as you walked down the street or on your way to work or to a meeting. These pictures and videos are being taken of you without you knowing.

And this raises a wide range of Ethical concerns. There are the ethics of deploying such solutions in the public domain, but there are also ethical concerns for the data scientists, machine learner, and other people working on these projects. “Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should”. People need to decide, if they are working on one of these projects, if they should be working on it and if not what they can do.

Ethics are the principals of behavior based on ideas of right and wrong. Ethical principles often focus on ideas such as fairness, respect, responsibility, integrity, quality, transparency and trust.  There is a lot in that statement on Ethics, but we all need to consider that is right and what is wrong. But instead of wrong, what is grey-ish, borderline scenarios.

Here are some examples that might fall into the grey-ish space between right and wrong. Why they might fall more towards the wrong is because most people are not aware their image is being captured and used, not just for a particular purpose at capture time, but longer term to allow for better machine learning models to be built.

Can you imagine walking down the street with a digital display in front of you. That display is monitoring you, and others, and then presents personalized adverts on the digital display aim specifically at you. A classify example of this is in the film Minority Report. This is no longer science fiction.

This is happening at the Westfield shopping center in London and in other cities across UK and Europe. These digital advertisement screens are monitoring people, identifying their personal characteristics and then customizing the adverts to match in with the profile of the people walking past. This solutions has been developed and rolled out by Ocean Out Door. They are using machine learning to profile the individual people based on gender, age, facial hair, eye wear, mood, engagement, attention time, group size, etc. They then use this information to:

Face Plus Plus can monitor people walking down the street and do similar profiling, and can bring it to another level where by they can identify what clothing you are wearing and what the brand is. Image if you combine this with location based services. An example of this, imagine you are walking down the high street or a major retail district. People approach you trying to entice you into going into a particular store, and they offer certain discounts. But you are with a friend and the store is not interested in them.

The store is using video monitoring, capturing details of every person walking down the street and are about to pass the store. The video is using machine/deep learning to analyze you profile and what brands you are wearing. The store as a team of people who are deployed to stop and engage with certain individuals, just because they make the brands or interests of the store and depending on what brands you are wearing can offer customized discounts and offers to you.

How comfortable would you be with this? How comfortable would you be about going shopping now?

For me, I would not like this at all, but I can understand why store and retail outlets are interested, as they are all working in a very competitive market trying to maximize every dollar or euro they can get.

Along side the ethical concerns, we also have some legal aspects to consider. Some of these are a bit in the grey-ish area, as some aspects of these kind of scenarios are slightly addresses by EU GDPR and the EU Artificial Intelligence guidelines. But what about other countries around the World. Then it comes to training and deploying these facial models, they are dependent on having a good training data set. This means they needs lots and lots of pictures of people and these pictures need to be labelled with descriptive information about the person. For these public deployments of facial recognition systems, then will need more and more training samples/pictures. This will allow the models to improve and evolve over time. But how will these applications get these new pictures? They claim they don’t keep any of the images of people. They only take the picture, use the model on it, and then perform some action. They claim they do not keep the images! But how can they improve and evolve their solution?

I’ll have another blog post giving more examples of how machine/deep learning, video and image captures are being used to monitor people going about their daily lives.