LIVE FACIAL RECOGNITION: THE MET POLICE'S CONTROVERSIAL NEW TECH

It has already been used at high-profile events, despite concerns about the privacy, accuracy and bias of this Al-driven system

- DR PETER BENTLEY

Government ministers in the UK are pushing for the MET police to make use of automated facial recognition for routine law enforcement.

As police officers already wear body cameras, it would be possible to send the images they record directly to live facial recognition (LFR) systems. This would mean everyone the officers encounter could be instantly checked to see if they match the data of someone on a watchlist - a database of offenders wanted by the police and courts.

The technology has already been used for high-profile gatherings such as King Charles's Coronation, but could rolling it out more widely lead to a rise in distrust of the police force due to concerns about accuracy and privacy?

WHAT IS LFR AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

Artificial intelligences (AIs) trained to perform facial recognition were one of the first types of practical machine learning systems developed by computer scientists.

They're commonly used alongside 'dot projector' lasers, which can map thousands of points on a human face, to create the highly accurate biometric readers that we use to unlock our phones.

The LFR used by the police is much simpler. It relies on a camera to scan the surroundings and create a flat image. This image is then split into segments by the AI and the faces in it are mapped to find key features, such as distances between the eyes, noses and mouths, to build simple biometric records.

These records can then be compared to those stored in a database of known offenders using a neural network - a type of AI inspired by the human brain.