Examples of Machine Learning with Facial Recognition

Posted on June 3, 2019 Updated on May 20, 2019

In a previous blog post I gave some examples of how facial images recognition and videos are being used in our daily lives. In this post I want to extend this with some additional examples. There are ethical issues around this and in some of these examples their usage has stopped. What is also interesting is the reaction on various social media channels about this. People don’t like it and and happen that some of these have stopped.

But how widespread is this technology? Based on these known examples, and this list is by no means anywhere near complete, but gives an indication of the degree of it’s deployment and how widespread it is.

Dubai is using facial recognition to measure customer satisfaction at four of the Roads and Transport Authority Customer Happiness Centers. They analyze the faces of their customers and rank their level of happiness. They can use this to generate alerts when the happiness levels falls below certain levels.

Various department stores are using facial recognition throughout the stores and at checkout. These are being used to delivery personalized adverts to users on either in-store screen or on personalized screens on the shopping trolley. And can be used to verify a person’s age if they are buying alcohol or other products. Tesco’s have previously used face-scanning cameras at tills in petrol stations to target advertisements at customers depending on their age and approximate age.

Some retail stores are using ML to monitor you, monitor what items you pick up and what you pay for at the checkout, identifying any differences and what steps to take next.

In a slight variation of facial recognition, some stores are using similar technology to monitor stock levels, monitor how people interact with different products (e.g pick up one product and then relate it with a similar product), and optimized location of products. Walmart has been a learner in the are of AI and Machine Learning in the retail section for some time now.

The New York Metropolitan Transport Authority has been using facial capture and recognition at several site across the city. Their proof of concept location was at the Robert F Kennedy Bridge. The company supplying the technology claimed 80% accuracy at predicting the person, through a widescreen while the car was traveling at low speed. These images can then be matched against government databases, such as driver license authorities, police databases and terrorist databases. The problem with this project was that it did not achieve one single positive match (within acceptable parameters) during the initial period of the project.

There are some reports that similar technology is being use on the New York Subway system in Time Square to help with identifying fare dodgers.

How about using facial recognition at boarding gates for your new flight instead of showing your passport or other official photo id. JetBlue and other airlines are now using this technology. Some airports have been using this for many many years.

San Francisco City government took steps in May 2019 to ban the use of facial recognition across all city functions. Other cities like Oakland and Sommerville in Massachusetts have implemented similar bans with other cities likely to follow. But it doesn’t ban the use by private companies.

What about using this technology to automatically monitor and manage staff. Manage staff, as in to decide who should be fired and who should be reallocated elsewhere. It is reported that Amazon is using facial and other recognition systems to monitor staff productivity in their warehouses.

A point I highlighted in my previous post was how are these systems/applications able to get enough images as training samples for their models. This is considering that most of the able systems/applications say they don’t keep any of the images they capture.

How many of us take pictures and post them on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. By doing this, you are making those images available to these companies to training their machine learning model. To do this they scrap the images for these sites and then have to manually label them with descriptive information. It is a combination of the image and descriptive information that is used by the machine learning algorithms to learn and build a model that suits their needs. See the MIT Technology Review article for more details and example on this topic.

There are also reports of some mobile phone apps that turn on your mobile phone camera. The apps will detect if the phone is possibly mounted on the dashboard of a car, and then takes pictures of the inside of the car and also pictures of where you are driving. Similar reports exists about many apps and voice activated devices.

So be careful what you post on social media or anywhere else online, and be careful of what apps you have on your mobile phone!

There is a general backlash to the use of this technology, and with more people becoming aware of what is happening, we need to more aware of what when and where this technology is being used.