If a trip to your local motor vehicle registry wasn't enough of a pain, it turns out that you may not even be able to smile when you finally wade through the lines to get your picture taken. According to a story in the Times of Northwest Indiana, the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) is not going to let drivers smile any more for their licenses.
The smile ban is not because driving is a serious business, and it's not because the only people looking at that picture will probably be police officers or someone at a liquor store or beer line at a concert. It is because the state's license photos are now part of a computer system that relies on facile recognition. And, according to the BMV, the software cannot function optimally if the subject of a photo has a happy face.
From the article:
A person's new photograph will be compared against old photographs on file -- more than 6 million dating back at least eight years -- to protect customers from identity fraud, said Ron Stiver, BMV commissioner....BMV Communications Director Dennis Rosebrough said if a criminal went to get a driver's license under his name, the criminal's photograph would be compared to an old photograph of Rosebrough and the BMV could be alerted the next day that the two don't match.
For those in the UK, this is old news. A BBC News article reported back in 2004 that smiles and other expressions that were not "neutral" wouldn't be allowed on passport photos.
A Home Office spokesman said: "When the mouth is open it can make it difficult for facial recognition technology to work effectively."...The new rules say "photographs must show no shadows: your face looking straight at the camera, a neutral expression, with your mouth closed."
Companies like L-1 Identity Solutions with its FaceIt Argus offering will most likely be scanning your face in public places in the near future if not today, comparing your digital mug shot to those in databases, and making a quick decision on who you are and whether you are a threat. Of course, all these stored "faces" and databases, with related information about the individual raise all sorts of privacy concerns. As we mentioned previously, these "security" databases are growing, and in the case of many of those designed to nab terrorists and other bad guys, they have many problems.
Facile recognition: Not just for Big Brother
It's not just government or police agencies that are using facile recognition, either. For example, Picassa, a popular free photo management tool from Google, recently added a capability to compare photos using similar technology in order to automatically discover -- and "tag" -- photos of similar people. Google discusses this in the Name Tags section of Picassa Help:
After you enable name tags, Picassa Web Albums will look for similar faces in your photo collection. Depending on the number of faces you have, this process can take some time. When the scan is complete, you'll see an Add name tags button on the My Photos tab along with the number of faces that were detected in your gallery.
In the future, you might just have to explain to your significant other why the digital photo album is insisting your ex is in a recent photo of you about town.
Further reading for those interested in facile recognition
For more information on just how this technology works, click on over to the ever-useful How Stuff Works Web site for its entry on facile recognition. If you feel like browsing Wikipedia for a history of the software and its use, click here.
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