Facing up to reality
"Facial recognition is rubbish, it is about the worst of the biometrics technologies," says Roger Clarke, industry consultant and director of technology management consultancy Xamax. "Everyone from airports to local councils is cheerfully believing that by buying this wildly expensive software they are going to solve all their crime problems. It is just a huge waste of tax payers money."
Despite his particularly critical stance, Clarke says he is not against the technology per se, but is simply concerned with its implementation.
"Biometrics is an enormously dangerous use of technologies," Clarke says. "We are playing with dynamite and we haven't worked it out yet."
Clarke's principal concerns surround the privacy and efficacy of different biometric techniques.
"If you want to look at somebody's iris, you have to slow them down enough to actually scan their eyes. It requires their participation to a certain extent," Clarke says. "What is absurd is to expect a similar result from a camera perched above a crowd of people, and then respond to people in certain ways."
At the other end of the scale sits Spiros Kalotihos, chairman of Melbourne-based business group Aid and Abet. A proponent of biometric surveillance, Kalotihos caused a privacy furore over a series of databases he compiled on business and 'suspicious characters'.
"To the business community, biometrics will be about as valuable as tits on a bull on unless you can link the individual you are identifying to some kind of history," Kalotihos said. "At the end of the day if you can't attach the images to some kind of database of information it is just going to end up as a gimmick for retailers--a fridge who knows who you are."
Aside from a few high profile roll-outs in places like Crown Casino in Melbourne, industry pundits say face recognition technology is fairly wide spread.
"Facial-recognition technology can be very effective as long as it is implemented appropriately," explains BiometixCEO Ted Dunstone, who began his career by completing a PhD in the facial-recognition arena. "If you have someone sitting directly in front of the scanner in a situation where the lighting can be controlled then you have a fairly good chance of success."
However, when it comes to crowd surveillance, Dunstone says that it is absurd to place too much faith in the technology alone.
"When you are looking at a place like a shopping centre or a casino you really need to have people working in conjunction with the technology," Dunstone says. "The software might come up with a series of possible matches, and a person needs to decide if they are correct or not."
The extent to which this is any kind of improvement on traditional methods of surveillance, which depend on security staff scanning shopping centre crowds for suspicious characters, is essentially yet to be proven.
"The whole point of biometrics is that it works well as long as it is implemented appropriately," Dunstone explains. "You have to match each biometric to an appropriate niche application."
