Forensics

Is Facial Recognition Tech Accurate?

More police departments have explored the use of facial recognition technology for crowd control or to identify suspects. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has run over 390,000 facial recognition searches since 2011. The Department of Homeland Security has also said it could use facial recognition at the border and for travelers, although it dropped plans this month to seek permission to use the technology to scan travelers coming in and out of the country. 

Now, a new study unveils inaccuracies in the results of these searches. Top facial recognition systems misidentify people of color at higher rates than white people, according to a US federal study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

While conducting a particular type of database search known as “one-to-one” matching, many facial recognition algorithms falsely identified African-American and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more than white faces.

​In one-to-many matching (the type of search done by law enforcement investigators that compares an image to a database of other faces)​, African American women were falsely identified most frequently.