Current Technology: Hollywood Perception Versus Reality
May 6, 2013
Technology has saved the day on more than one occasion but Ars Technica discusses a recent situation where it fell short: identifying the images of the Tsarnaev brothers. The article “Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn’t Help Find Bombing Suspects” tells us more.
Where the Boston Police Commission’s facial recognition system failed, good old video surveillance was there to pick up the slack.
The referenced article quotes from the Washington Post:
‘’The work was painstaking and mind-numbing: One agent watched the same segment of video 400 times. The goal was to construct a timeline of images, following possible suspects as they moved along the sidewalks, building a narrative out of a random jumble of pictures from thousands of different phones and cameras. It took a couple of days, but analysts began to focus on two men in baseball caps who had brought heavy black bags into the crowd near the marathon’s finish line but left without those bags.’”
While technology may look glamorously at its zenith, this recent situation makes it clear that we are not necessarily light-years ahead of the technology available to consumers. Software still has some hurdles to clear despite science fiction movies’ assertions.
Megan Feil, May 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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