Friday, April 26, 2013

Police commissioner: Facial recognition tech failed to ID Boston bombers

Boston Police Commissioner said that his department's facial recognition system "did not identify" the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects in an interview with the Washington Post.

"The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs' images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver's license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation," the Post wrote on Saturday.

Reportedly, Facial recognition systems can have limited success when a grainy, low-resolution image from a cellphone camera or surveillance video is compared with a high-quality image.

However, painstaking video surveillance reviews were very helpful in finding the suspects.

For more of the Ars Technica story: arstechnica.com

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