Facing Facts

The Market For Facial Recognition Technologies Is Expected To Grow To $9.6 Billion By 2022, According Recent Industry Insights. Today, It Is Being Used In A Variety Of Ways From Allowing You To Unlock Your Phone, Go Through Security At The Airport And Now It Is Increasingly Being Used By Law Enforcement Agencies For Surveillance And Security. However, Just Like With Any Other New Technology, Facial Recognition Brings Positives And Negatives With It, Daniel Bardsley Reports.

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As you walk outside onto the street, a camera picks up your image – and before long, the police are able to identify who you are.

This might sound like a scene from an outlandish novel set in the future, but it is fast becoming reality thanks to automated facial recognition (AFR) technology.

Today it is being used by authorities, especially police, from the United Arab Emirates to the United States, from the United Kingdom to China.

“I think it’s a technological solution to an age-old problem, which is how to identify people who pose a potential risk to public safety,” says Professor Martin Innes, director of the Crime and Security Research Institute at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.

“It marries up the kinds of thinking that have been associated with CCTV monitoring of public spaces with a bigdata approach.”

Also referred to as automatic facial recognition technology, it is being employed in Dubai to considerable effect, according to reports.

The city’s police force has said that its use has led to the identification and apprehension of significant numbers of offenders.

In association with CCTV cameras, of which there are thousands around Dubai, AFR has reportedly helped Dubai Police to arrest 319 suspects in 2018.

Operating in the emirate as part of the Oyoon (“eyes”) initiative, the technology involves artificial intelligence (AI) and works in conjunction with photographs of criminals uploaded to a police database.

While the law enforcement side of AFR often grabs the headlines, there is much interest in using the technology in other contexts.

For several years it has been used in Dubai and Abu Dhabi to identify workers and clock them in and out of construction sites.