
500MP camera that can identify every face in a crowd of tens of thousands - systemfreund
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/26/china-unveils-500-megapixel-camera-can-identify-every-face-crowd/
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bArray
This sounds like hell, especially coupled with China trying to "predict crime"
before it happens [1] and a "social credit" score based in part on who you are
seen with [2]. It's only a matter of time before this technology is
implemented in your Country [3].

[1] [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-ai-
crime...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-ai-crimes-
before-happen-artificial-intelligence-security-plans-beijing-meng-
jianzhu-a7962496.html)

[2] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-
china-34592186](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/ecuador-
survei...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/ecuador-surveillance-
cameras-police-government.html)

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TheSpiceIsLife
This looks to be either 36 or 40, can't quite count the discrete units
correctly from the photo.

Let's say it's 40 x ~14MP cameras fixed in to a housing.

What's stopping anyone from using higher resolution subunits and more of them.

Or, if you bolt ten of these things together do you get a 5000MP camera?

~~~
starky
Well, they are having to align some number of sensors ensuring sufficient
overlap to ensure that they can process the images together. This means they
either are warping, aligning, and combining the image into one frame to do
processing (computationally intensive), or they have significantly more
overlap to ensure that one of the frames contains the entire face (storage
intensive), or they are doing some super-resolution processing trickery with
lower resolution sensors.

500MP x 10 ips is 5 billion pixels per second that they have to process, that
is equivalent to processing 20 4K30 streams at once, even without taking into
consideration the extra data you would need, then you actually need to store
the data somewhere and do the facial recognition. How many of these do you
think would be reasonable to have in an area?

~~~
bArray
> Well, they are having to align some number of sensors

> ensuring sufficient overlap to ensure that they can

> process the images together.

It would be much easier to avoid the issue of stitching altogether and simply
process the images separately, then merge the resulting output data. As far as
I'm aware, you're not going to find a GPU that can process a 500MP image
efficiently.

~~~
starky
But when the images are processed separately, your required actual recorded
resolution could go up quickly as your overlap between imagers needs to ensure
that a face to be identified is contained within a single imager, or at least
a large enough portion of the face is contained within an imager to give a
sufficiently high confidence of being correct. So as I mentioned, this becomes
even more storage intensive, though because there is less image processing, it
becomes more CPU efficient.

~~~
bArray
I disagree, if you miss an individual on the first capture, there's always the
second capture. The number of people you fail to detect because their face is
halfway between two screens would likely be far exceeded by the number of
faces you fail to detect because there's an issue within the algorithm itself
or simply the face isn't fully visible.

That's okay. There are of course limitations. You can't detect faces you can't
see, for example (i.e. somebody walking the wrong direction). If you're
detecting 10k faces at an accuracy of 99.99%, one in every detection frame is
a failure.

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bkmeneguello
I really don't understand why to concern. We keep putting more power in
government's hands in name of "peace" or "security". This is just one step
further.

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davidhyde
> China currently has an estimated 200 million CCTV cameras watching over its
> citizens

I wish reporters would stop mixing up cctv cameras with facial recognition
cameras. 200 million cctv cameras is a meaningless number in the context of
facial recognition. How many of those cameras are capable of facial
recognition? No wait, that’s way to “sciencey” and detailed for this clickbait
article.

~~~
Yetanfou
Facial recognition is a software function which can be performed on image data
coming from any camera with sufficient resolution, most likely that includes
the majority of surveillance cameras deployed in China. China might suffer
under an antiquated and corrupt political system but the country does not lack
modern technology.

~~~
myself248
Furthermore, facial recognition is constantly improving, and a camera that
might've been inadequate for it a few years ago can now be used for matching,
if not training.

Combine that with the replacement rate of cameras, and you get two factors
crossing each other and meaning that the vast majority of those 200M cameras
can already be used for recognition, and the ones that can't today, will be
soon.

~~~
davidhyde
My point was not about what China is doing and what they are capable of. My
point is that the reporting is shoddy.

You simply cannot recognise someone’s face in a large crowd with a traditional
wide angle 320x240 resolution cctv camera mounted high up on a pole. This is
not the movies where you can “zoom in and clarify”. Traditional cctv can place
people at a certain time based on the colour of their clothes, their height
etc. It is used for gathering evidence after a crime has been committed, not
for automatically recognising people.

Modern cctv has high enough resolution for facial recognition but nobody
bothers reporting numbers properly. It’s the differentiation between the
capabilities that I want to point out. It’s like saying that there are 1 bn
toy guns AND real guns in existence. It’s a meaningless number.

~~~
fireattack
Of course I don't have a number or source either, but it's not really that
common to have such low resolution camera even for surveillance any more. At
least not in China.

