Given the low-res footage that one expects from your typical security camera, sometimes it can be quite hard to figure out the facial features on a person’s face. Well apparently a French company called Vesalis has a piece of facial recognition technology that is powerful enough that it managed to capture the attention of the French government. Where was this technology prior to the government noticing it, you ask? Apparently in departmental stores. Originally designed for departmental store kiosks, this technology was powerful enough to pick up on a face from security cameras, which in turn will be sent to a salesperson’s iPad that a shopper had entered the building.
From there, the salesperson would be able to recall the shopper’s name, photo, history and shopping habits, thereby creating a unique shopping experience for each customer. When tested during a soccer game last year in October, the system achieved a pretty impressive accuracy rating of 98%, and this was good enough for the French government to want to deploy the technology to keep tabs on “people of concern”. Oddly enough when put through similar tests, the company’s vice president of US sales claim that they’ve only managed to achieve an accuracy rating of 61% so we’re not sure what’s with the discrepancy. Either way the leap from departmental stores to national security is pretty impressive.
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