The Brain of the unborn Gears Up for Processing Faces Well Before Birth

Amazing stuff!

"Newborn babies are naturally drawn to faces, a trait which helps them bond with their mothers and other caregivers. New ... research has now found that the functional brain network involved in processing dynamic faces in adults can be observed as early as the third trimester of pregnancy. ..."

From the abstract:

"Babies display social perceptual skills within hours of birth which may indicate that the neural predecessors of such skills have prenatal origins.

However, the putative fetal neural infrastructure supporting these skills remains unexplored.

Data from 497 participants scanned between 28–44 weeks postmenstrual age were examined to map the development of intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) within the proto social pathway (pSP), encompassing the superior temporal sulcus (STS), a region implicated in processing multimodal social stimuli later in development, and the proto ventral pathway (pVP), including the fusiform face area (FFA), a region associated with static face processing in older children and adults.

IFC was greater than 0 in the bilateral pSP and pVP by 28 weeks and increased significantly in the left and right pSP and left pVP but not in the right pVP between 28 and 44 weeks.

By 44 weeks, both pathways exhibited robust right-dominance.

By 40 weeks, iFC for the right and left pSP was significantly higher than in the corresponding pVPs. Lastly, the right posterior STS (pSTS) and the right FFA coupling became positive by 40 and 44 weeks and the left pSTS-FFA coupling became negative by 44 weeks.

These findings demonstrate that neural architecture supporting social perception later in life is present in the third trimester and undergoes rapid development across the pre- to postnatal transition.

The strengthening of intrinsic connectivity, emergence of right-hemisphere dominance, and early differentiation of putative social perception and face-processing circuitry indicate that key features of the social brain begin to assemble before birth, providing a developmental scaffold for later social development."

The Brain Gears Up for Processing Faces Well Before Birth | Yale School of Medicine

Development of the social perception pathway across the third trimester of gestation and perinatal transition (open access)

Fig. 1 Schematic representation of the social perception and ventral face perception pathways in the brain.

(A) The social perception pathway extends from the motion-sensitive medial temporal/visual 5 (V5) area through the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), medial STS (mSTS), and anterior STS (aSTS). The ventral object/face processing pathway extends from the primary visual cortex (V1) through the lateral occipital complex (LOC) to the fusiform gyrus (FFG) area. ...

(B) The nodes for the social perception pathway: middle temporal area (red), posterior superior temporal sulcus (yellow), middle superior temporal sulcus (blue), and anterior superior temporal sulcus (green).

(C) The nodes for the ventral pathway: V1 (red), lateral occipital complex (green), and fusiform gyrus (blue).

AI Can Tell Your Political Affiliation Just by Looking at Your Face, Researchers Find

Now, this is a little spooky if confirmed! Time to wear masks! 😊

"A study recently published in the peer-reviewed American Psychologist journal claims that a combination of facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology can accurately assess a person’s political orientation by simply looking at that person’s blank, expressionless face. ..."

From the abstract:

"Carefully standardized facial images of 591 participants were taken in the laboratory while controlling for self-presentation, facial expression, head orientation, and image properties. They were presented to human raters and a facial recognition algorithm: both humans (r = .21) and the algorithm (r = .22) could predict participants’ scores on a political orientation scale (Cronbach’s α = .94) decorrelated with age, gender, and ethnicity. These effects are on par with how well job interviews predict job success, or alcohol drives aggressiveness. The algorithm’s predictive accuracy was even higher (r = .31) when it leveraged information on participants’ age, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, the associations between facial appearance and political orientation seem to generalize beyond our sample: The predictive model derived from standardized images (while controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity) could predict political orientation (r ≈ .13) from naturalistic images of 3,401 politicians from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The analysis of facial features associated with political orientation revealed that conservatives tended to have larger lower faces. The predictability of political orientation from standardized images has critical implications for privacy, the regulation of facial recognition technology, and understanding the origins and consequences of political orientation."

AI Can Tell Your Political Affiliation Just by Looking at Your Face, Researchers Find

Facial Recognition Technology and Human Raters Can Predict Political Orientation From Images of Expressionless Faces Even When Controlling for Demographics and Self-Presentation (open access)

Credits: The Gradient (weekly newsletter)

Figure 1. Three Causal Pathways Linking Facial Features and Political OrientationNote. The facial image was used with permission.

Is Facial Recognition a Useful Public Safety Tool or Something Sinister? Benefits outweigh concerns!

This article below is kind of a book review!

Facial recognition is another topic prone to alarmism and hysteria!

Facial recognition in the hands of dictatorial regimes like Russia, China, and Iran are dangerous! However, these regimes will use this technology anyway. "The Chinese government has deployed over 700 million surveillance cameras; in many cases, artificial intelligence analyzes their output in real time. Chinese authorities have used it to police behavior like jaywalking and to monitor racial and religious minorities and political dissidents. Hill reports there is a "red list" of VIPs who are invisible to facial recognition systems. "In China, being unseen is a privilege," ... Meanwhile, Iranian authorities are using facial recognition tech to monitor women protesting for civil rights by refusing to wear hijabs in public. ..."

As far as forensics is concerned face recognition is an addition to dactyloscopy (finger print identification).

Face recognition may also help e.g. find abducted children, exonerate innocent people and much more. 

Claims of racial bias are as spurious as usual:

"Some privacy activists argue that facial recognition technologies are racially biased and do not work as well on some groups. But as developers continued to train their algorithms, they mostly fixed that problem; the software's disparities with respect to race, gender, and age are now so negligible as to be statistically insignificant."

Images on the Internet are in the public domain:

"... As Hill documents, the billions of photos in Clearview AI's ever-growing database were scraped without permission [???] from Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and other social media sites. The company argues that what it is doing is no different than the way Google catalogs links and data for its search engine, only that theirs is for photographs. The legal memo leaked to Hill was part of the company's defense against numerous lawsuits filed by social media companies and privacy advocates who objected to the data scraping. ..."

"This book traces the longer history of attempts to deploy accurate and pervasive facial recognition technology, but it chiefly focuses on the quixotic rise of Clearview AI. Hill first learned of this company's existence in November 2019, when someone leaked a legal memo to her in which the mysterious company claimed it could identify nearly anyone on the planet based only on a snapshot of their face. ...

"We have developed a revolutionary, web-based intelligence platform for law enforcement to use as a tool to help generate high-quality investigative leads," explains the company's website. "Our platform, powered by facial recognition technology, includes the largest known database of 40+ billion facial images sourced from public-only web sources, including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and other open sources." ..."

Is Facial Recognition a Useful Public Safety Tool or Something Sinister? Your Face Belongs to Us documents how facial recognition might threaten our freedom.

Is the biological evolution of face recognition a curse or a blessing?

Probably both or in between! As so often in life and reality, it is complicated.

Just learnt that the ability of face recognition may have lead to individuals of one population being aggressive to individual strangers from the same population (see my blog post here).

Wasp populations that recognize faces cooperate more, and may be smarter than wasp populations that are not capable of face recognition

Amazing stuff! Apparently, these distinguishing phenomena developed/evolved only a few hundred miles apart. 

In biological evolution, geography ca be destiny.

"... Furthermore, genomic sequencing revealed that populations of wasps that recognized each other – and cooperated more – showed recent adaptations (positive selection) in areas of the genome associated with cognitive abilities such as learning, memory and vision. ...
Observing nesting behaviors in the spring when females established nests, ...  found that southern queens mostly remained solitary and established their own nests, but in the north, three or four females would inhabit a nest, with one taking over the role of queen and laying most of the eggs, and the others operating more like workers, engaged more in foraging.

While individuals from northern and southern populations are of the same species, they look very different. Southern paper wasps tend to have nearly identical red color patterns on their faces. The northern ones have distinctive black and yellow patterns. ...
Wasps from the northern population were aggressive to strangers, but much less so to the wasp they had previously met two days earlier. “Individuals in the southern population treat everyone the same,”  ..."

From the highlights and abstract:

"Highlights

• Cooperation and signal diversity covary across the geographic range of a paper wasp

• The ability to recognize individuals is related to cooperation and signal diversity

• Individual recognition stabilizes social groups

• Selection on social cognition genes is stronger in more cooperative populations

Summary

The ability to recognize others is a frequent assumption of models of the evolution of cooperation. At the same time, cooperative behavior has been proposed as a selective agent favoring the evolution of individual recognition abilities. Although theory predicts that recognition and cooperation may co-evolve, data linking recognition abilities and cooperative behavior with evidence of selection are elusive. Here, we provide evidence of a selective link between individual recognition and cooperation in the paper wasp Polistes fuscatus through a combination of clinal, common garden, and population genomics analyses. We identified latitudinal clines in both rates of cooperative nesting and color pattern diversity, consistent with a selective link between recognition and cooperation. In behavioral experiments, we replicated previous results demonstrating individual recognition in cooperative and phenotypically diverse P. fuscatus from New York. In contrast, wasps from a less cooperative and phenotypically uniform Louisiana population showed no evidence of individual recognition. In a common garden experiment, groups of wasps from northern populations formed more stable and individually biased associations, indicating that recognition facilitates group stability. The strength of recent positive selection on cognition-associated loci likely to mediate individual recognition is substantially greater in northern compared with southern P. fuscatus populations. Collectively, these data suggest that individual recognition and cooperative nesting behavior have co-evolved in P. fuscatus because recognition helps stabilize social groups. This work provides evidence of a specific cognitive phenotype under selection because of social interactions, supporting the idea that social behavior can be a key driver of cognitive evolution."

Wasps that recognize faces cooperate more, and may be smarter | Cornell Chronicle Social interactions may well make animals smarter and more diverse, a new study of paper wasps suggests.

Evidence for a selective link between cooperation and individual recognition (no public access)

Graphical abstract

Paper wasps from a northern population in Ithaca have diverse black and yellow color patterns on their faces and are able to recognize individuals.

Paper wasps from a southern population in Louisiana have reddish and more uniform faces and behave indiscriminately towards each other.

Rite Aid banned from using AI facial recognition tech after it incorrectly flagged customers as shoplifters

Appears to be a stupid decision! Other retail stores ought not to be discouraged. 

Human face recognition is improving every day and it is in the meantime fairly reliable!

The approach as applied by Rite Aid stores was dubious to some extent, but this does not completely discredit the approach in general.

Certainly, one way to catch shoplifters is to identify them when they go shopping! Might also make would be shoplifters think twice!

"The Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday that pharmacy chain Rite Aid is prohibited from using artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition after the technology incorrectly flagged customers as shoplifters in over a thousand instances.

Rite Aid, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October, deployed facial recognition software in roughly 200 store locations from 2012 to 2020.

According to a 2020 report from Reuters, the pharmacy chain installed the technology in mostly "lower-income, non-white neighborhoods" in Democratic-led New York and Los Angeles. Rite Aid defended its use of the technology and insisted that the decision on where to deploy the software was "data-driven" and based on the location's crime statistics. ..."

Rite Aid banned from using AI facial recognition tech after it incorrectly flagged customers as shoplifters: 'Reckless' | Blaze Media

Nature journal: The unseen Black faces of AI facial recognition algorithms. Really!

The once prestigious Nature journal continues to spread propaganda and demagoguery! Apparently, it is good business to do so!

Anyone with common sense knows that new technologies have kinks that need to be fixed. No need to suggest racism here!

This is a very long Nature views & news article and only at the very end you fully realize it is predicated on the skin color ideology! 

Now developers of facial recognition technology are forced to give more importance to darker skinned faces? This is one form of racism. So what about e.g. Asian faces?

Timmit Gebru is a controversial AI researcher. She was fired by Google!

"Data sets are essential for training and validating machine-learning algorithms. But these data are typically sourced from the Internet, so they encode all the stereotypes, inequalities and power asymmetries that exist in society.  ...
Although this has long been the case, the first major steps towards overcoming the issue were taken only four years ago, when Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru published a report that kick-started sweeping changes in the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). As a graduate student in computer science, Buolamwini was frustrated that commercial facial-recognition systems failed to identify her face in photographs and video footage. ...
Amid what can feel like overwhelming public enthusiasm for new AI technologies, Buolamwini and Gebru instigated a body of critical work that has exposed the bias, discrimination and oppressive nature of facial-analysis algorithms. ..."

The unseen Black faces of AI algorithms An audit of commercial facial-analysis tools found that dark-skinned faces are misclassified at a much higher rate than are faces from any other group. Four years on, the study is shaping research, regulation and commercial practices.

Joy Buolamwini founder of the Algorithmic Justice League. A purveyor of skin color ideology?

Facial recognition and e-boarding technology to be used at Indian airports

Good news! While lofty Western countries continue to demonize facial recognition!

European Union: Clearview AI hit with another €20M ban

I think this is another extreme overreaction by the Big Government of EU on face recognition technology! It is reminiscent of Luddites!

Should not the consumer and citizen have the last word?

"... Clearview AI has been hit with another sanction for breaching European privacy rules.

The Athens-based Hellenic data protection authority has fined the controversial facial recognition firm €20 million and banned it from collecting and processing the personal data of people living in Greece. It has also ordered it to delete any data on Greek citizens that it has already collected.

Since late last year, national DPAs in the U.K., Italy and France have also issued similar decisions sanctioning Clearview — effectively freezing its ability to sell its services in their markets since any local customers would be putting themselves at risk of being fined. ..."

Selfie scraping Clearview AI hit with another €20M ban order in Europe | TechCrunch: Athens-based data protection authority has fined Clearview AI €20M and banned it from collecting and processing the personal data of people living in Greece.

AI facial recognition tech identifies rocker Geddy Lee’s mother in anonymous Holocaust photos

The story speaks for itself!

Note this technology is still in its infancy. E.g. kinks etc. are still being ironed out (what a beautiful old fashioned idiom in the age of AI 😄).

I recently discussed here the pros and cons of face recognition.

"Rockstar Geddy Lee found never-before-seen photos of his mother’s family thanks to a new effort to apply artificial intelligence facial recognition technology to photographs from the Holocaust.

Lee’s mother, Holocaust survivor Mary Weinrib, died last summer at 95 years old. But the researchers of the AI technology, From Numbers to Names, managed to find a photo of Weinrib from her time at the displaced persons camp in Bergen-Belsen — a photo that then led Lee to find other photos of his mother’s extended family from the Yad Vashem photo collection. ..."

AI facial recognition tech identifies rocker Geddy Lee’s mother in anonymous Holocaust photos - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Instagram is testing an AI tool that verifies your age by scanning your face

This seems to be a useful application of face recognition technology going well beyond social media.

Note this technology is still in its infancy. E.g. kinks etc. are still being ironed out (what a beautiful old fashioned idiom in the age of AI 😄).

I recently discussed here the pros and cons of face recognition.

"Instagram is testing new methods for users to verify their age, including an AI tool built by a third-party company, Yoti, that estimates how old you are just by scanning your face. ...

Yoti is a well-known player in online age and ID verification, and its technology has been approved for use by the UK government and German digital regulators. It uses various facial signals to estimate a target’s age. (Though the company itself says it doesn’t know what exactly these signals are. Wrinkles? A look of ineffable sadness? It’s all in the mix.) ..."

Instagram is testing an AI tool that verifies your age by scanning your face - The Verge You can try it out yourself — how old does the computer think you are?

Face Search Engine: Beneficial tool or Stalkerware

I think, we have to get used to the idea that excellent face recognition capabilities are now a fact of life and available to the general public from now on. It is here to stay!

Face recognition is definitely a dual use technology. Probably, the benefits significantly outweigh the disadvantages.

It is still a fairly new tool. Hence, malfunctioning or unexpected results are to happen. These kinks or quirks will likely be eliminated or at least drastically reduced as time passes.

Just one recent example: The Ukraine is using face recognition to identify Russian soldiers who died fighting in the Ukraine. Well, perhaps the parents might be interested to learn what happened to their son.

You can bet that various governments are already using it and far more advanced than what is available to the public at large. It can be used for legitimate law enforcement or to spy on citizens etc.

Thus, critical reports or articles (like the one below) regarding this technology ought to be taken with a huge grain of salt!

"PimEyes is a service that allows users to search its database of faces using a picture. Unlike Clearview, PimEyes can be used by anyone for $29.99 per month. ..."

Gradient Update #27: Face Search Engine or Stalkerware? And a New LLM Benchmark

Clearview AI banned from selling its facial recognition app to most U.S. companies

This expansive ban might very well turn out to be Pyrrhic victory! This could be a serious setback to the application of this technology in the U.S. This settlement very likely has a chilling effect on this technology.

Facial recognition has also many benefits. Many citizens may not mind it being used properly to their benefit.

Photos of faces posted on the Internet or social media are kind of fair game or not unless an individual protests that his or her facial photo appears in a certain context etc.? Anyone or any company can cull those published photos. Don't post facial photos if you mind! What was once a private photo album shown only to fairly few people is now in the public domain. Get used to the new world we are living in.

Probably, some of the practices of Clearview were as a minimum controversial, but to ban the app?

A much more serious issue is, I believe, e.g. the potential for misidentification and its possibly negative consequences.

"A company that gained notoriety for selling access to billions of facial photos, many culled from social media without the knowledge of the individuals depicted, faces major new restrictions to its controversial business model.

On Monday, Clearview AI agreed to settle a 2020 lawsuit from the ACLU that accused the company of running afoul of an Illinois law banning the use of individuals’ biometric data without consent.

That law, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), protects the privacy of Illinois residents, but the Clearview settlement is a clear blueprint for how the law can be leveraged to bolster consumer protections on the national stage.

“By requiring Clearview to comply with Illinois’ pathbreaking biometric privacy law not just in the state, but across the country, this settlement demonstrates that strong privacy laws can provide real protections against abuse,” Deputy Director of ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project Nathan Freed Wessler said. ...

Clearview isn’t the only company to get tangled up in the trailblazing Illinois privacy law. Last year, Facebook was ordered to pay $650 million for violating BIPA by automatically tagging people in photos with the use of facial recognition tech.

According to the terms of the Clearview settlement, which is still in the process of being finalized by the court, the company will be nationally banned from selling or giving away access to its facial recognition database to private companies and individuals. ..."

"... A “Private Entity Ban,” in which Clearview has agreed to a nationwide injunction barring access to the Clearview App by: (i) any private entity or private individuals unless such access is compliant with BIPA; or (ii) any governmental employee not acting in his or her official capacity.

An “Illinois State Ban,” in which Clearview has agreed to a five-year injunction against access to the Clearview App: (i) by Illinois state and local agencies and their contractors; (ii) by any private entity located in Illinois even if permissible under BIPA; and (iii) by employees of Illinois state and local agencies and their contractors, whether in their individual or official capacities. ..."

Clearview AI banned from selling its facial recognition software to most US companies | TechCrunch

Facial Recognition: Clearview-ACLU Settlement Charts a New Path for BIPA and the First Amendment

Europe Wants To Create A Huge International Facial Recognition System And Share With EU Countries To Help Find Criminals

The usual concerns for individual privacy and personal data protection in the EU go out of the window when looking for suspected criminals across borders?

What about innocent citizens that get mixed up? 

How far will this go?

"... For the last 15 years, police agencies across Europe have been able to share fingerprints, DNA data, and car owner information in the hunt for criminals. Now, European legislators are preparing to integrate millions of images of people’s faces into the system, allowing for the deployment of facial recognition on a massive scale. ...
The extension of face recognition across Europe is part of a larger strategy to “modernize” enforcement on the continent, and it is covered under the Prüm II data-sharing agreements. The specifics were initially revealed in December, but as the full impact of the measures has become clear, European data regulators have become increasingly vocal in recent weeks. ..."

Europe Wants To Create A Huge International Facial Recognition System And Share With EU Countries To Help Find Criminals - MarkTechPost

Face Recognition for Genetic Disorders

Unfortunately, this technology appears not yet to be available to the general public!

"... People with certain genetic disorders share common facial features. Doctors are using computer vision to identify such syndromes in children so they can get early treatment. ...
Face2Gene is an app from Boston-based FDNA that recognizes genetic disorders from images of patients’ faces. Introduced in 2014, it was upgraded recently to identify over 1,000 syndromes (more than three times as many as the previous version) based on fewer examples. In addition, the upgrade can recognize additional conditions as photos of them are added to the company’s database — no retraining required. ..."

From the abstract:

"Syndromic genetic conditions, in aggregate, affect 8% of the population. Many syndromes have recognizable facial features that are highly informative to clinical geneticists. Recent studies show that facial analysis technologies measured up to the capabilities of expert clinicians in syndrome identification. However, these technologies identified only a few disease phenotypes, limiting their role in clinical settings, where hundreds of diagnoses must be considered. Here we present a facial image analysis framework, DeepGestalt, using computer vision and deep-learning algorithms, that quantifies similarities to hundreds of syndromes. DeepGestalt outperformed clinicians in three initial experiments, two with the goal of distinguishing subjects with a target syndrome from other syndromes, and one of separating different genetic subtypes in Noonan syndrome. On the final experiment reflecting a real clinical setting problem, DeepGestalt achieved 91% top-10 accuracy in identifying the correct syndrome on 502 different images. The model was trained on a dataset of over 17,000 images ... DeepGestalt potentially adds considerable value to phenotypic evaluations in clinical genetics, genetic testing, research and precision medicine."

P.S. Is this face or facial recognition? I suppose the latter.

The Batch: AI Without Coding, Face Recognition Sees Genetic Disorders, Simulating Stock Markets, Tracking AI's Global Progress

Identifying facial phenotypes of genetic disorders using deep learning (published 2019, no public access)

Ukraine claims it's using facial recognition to identify dead Russian soldiers

This is an unusual approach! During times of war almost anything goes!

"Ukraine has started using facial recognition technology to identify dead Russian soldiers, a senior government official has claimed.

Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister of Ukraine and minister of digital transformation, confirmed that Ukraine was using facial recognition software to find the social media accounts of deceased Russian soldiers, allowing authorities to contact their friends and families. The aim is to dispel misinformation surrounding the war in the country, and specifically Russian claims that it is just a special operation with few losses, he wrote on his Telegram channel. ..."

Ukraine claims it's using facial recognition to identify dead Russian soldiers

Ukraine is using AI face recognition to identify victims and vet people at checkpoints

Recommendable!

"The Ukraine defense ministry announced that it is now using facial recognition technology from an American startup to combat misinformation, identify the dead, and expose Russian assailants. ...
After the war broke out, the American-based artificial intelligence company Clearview reached out to Ukraine’s government, offering its services free of charge. This week, the collaboration became official and Clearview’s facial recognition tech is now claimed to be used for security purposes, such as vetting people of interest at checkpoints. ..."

Ukraine is using AI facial recognition to identify victims and vet people at checkpoints High-tech facial recognition AI is now joining the battlefield in Ukraine.

On Facebook's decision to shut down face recognition

I don't think this was a smart or wise decision by Facebook/Meta! It is almost a medieval or superstitious decision!

Face recognition is here to stay! Like all technologies it can be used for good and evil!

"... Face recognition powered several Facebook features under a single opt-in. Over a third of its 1.8 billion daily users took advantage of them. ...
Facebook’s move follows similar actions by Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. The trend suggests dim prospects for face recognition in mass-market consumer settings. ..." (Source)

Facebook even gives a nice example in their announcement, which people this shutdown will hurt:

"... This change will also impact Automatic Alt Text (AAT), which creates image descriptions for blind and visually-impaired people. After this change, AAT descriptions will no longer include the names of people recognized in photos but will function normally otherwise. ..."

An Update On Our Use of Face Recognition | Meta

China built the world’s largest facial recognition system. Now, it’s getting camera-shy

Civil rights are coming to Communist Party ruled China!

"China built the world's largest facial recognition system. Now, it's getting camera-shy. ...
He thought it was unreasonable for the park to use facial recognition for entry to the park, and sued the zoo for breach of contract and violation of consumer rights. The case is widely acknowledged to be the first lawsuit over facial recognition in China, and has sparked a large amount of media attention. He won the case last year but appealed with the intent to receive a broader ruling that set a precedent for similar cases, which a court ruled in favor of last week. This ruling limits the ability of private businesses to use facial recognition, which has been increasingly pervasive in China. Because of the ruling, as of Aug. 1 hotels, shopping malls, airports and other commercial venues must get consent from customers to use facial recognition. ..." (Source)

"Guo Bing, a law professor in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, liked the zoo enough to purchase an annual pass. But he didn’t like it nearly enough to let the zoo take a high-resolution scan of his face.

In what judges called the first case of its kind in China, Guo sued the zoo — and won. He argued there was no legal basis for the Hangzhou Safari Park to collect visitors’ biometric data, and that it had not taken precautions to protect the information. In April, a Chinese appeals court ruled in favor of Guo, ordering the zoo to refund him and delete his face scan and fingerprints. ..."

China built the world’s largest facial recognition system. Now, it’s getting camera-shy.

Learning Spatial Attention for Face Super-Resolution

This seems to be a promising computer vision research area with lots of practical applications!

Perhaps, this will e.g. help to identify the criminals who committed massive voter fraud in the Fulton county vote counting center in Georgia.

"General image super-resolution techniques have difficulties in recovering detailed face structures when applying to low resolution face images. Recent deep learning based methods tailored for face images have achieved improved performance by jointly trained with additional task such as face parsing and landmark prediction. ... In this paper, we introduce a novel SPatial Attention Residual Network (SPARNet) built on our newly proposed Face Attention Units (FAUs) for face super-resolution. Specifically, we introduce a spatial attention mechanism to the vanilla residual blocks. This enables the convolutional layers to adaptively bootstrap features related to the key face structures and pay less attention to those less feature-rich regions. This makes the training more effective and efficient as the key face structures only account for a very small portion of the face image. Visualization of the attention maps shows that our spatial attention network can capture the key face structures well even for very low resolution faces (e.g., 16×16). ..."

Learning Spatial Attention for Face Super-Resolution | DeepAI