Police Work
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Police personnel are doing a great job catching criminals in the act, but police cannot be everywhere they are needed to be. To improve the thought of putting criminals behind bars people have developed new technology to catch a criminal and put them where they need to be. X-Ray scanning, Thermal Imaging, Facial Scanning, and Biometric technology are just some of the ways that technology is being used.
Criminal Identification procedures will improve in the future. They are trying to prevent terrorist attacks as much as they can. Just as luggage is systematically “X-rayed” to see whats inside, passengers may be in the future. So-called millimetre-wave scanners, which produce an image similar to X-ray, look through clothes to detect concealed weapons. It has many advantages such unlike metal detectors, these can reveal ceramic knives as well as some plastics. Faster than traditional X-ray machines, they produce a moving 360o image. One drawback, though, is privacy – the machines can reveal rather too much of what is underneath ones clothes. “Its still in development,” says Mr. White. “There are solutions we are looking at, such as modesty filters that apply a sort of fig-leaf to the image.” (Duffy, James, 2003)
New devices are appearing that automatically detect “strange” behavior. To do this, they learn basic elements of normal human behavior in a situation, such as people wandering though a terminal building. If someone starts running or jumping over barriers, the system flags up this “anomalous” behavior. Its reliability is hard to asses -what, after all, qualifies as “strange” behavior? It cuts down the element of human chance, says Emma Brassington, of the British firm Roke Manor Research. Biometrics is the buzzword of the moment. It means using the unique features of each human body to identify them. The trick is to get computers to do the recognizing. Iris scanning, highlighted in the movie Minority Report, is already in use at Amsterdams Schipol
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airport. Fingerprint recognition has also been tested, but proved easy to defeat. Another option is facial scanning, where computers seek to match up a face caught on camera with one of several thousand suspects in the data bank. “Our system measures the distance between the eyes and the mouth and then generates 1,700 other points on the
face before scanning a database of up to 100,000 images and finding a match – all in one second,” says Mr. Crombie. (Duffy, James, 2003)
One story that knocked war and terror attacks off the front pages earlier this year was Sars the potentially deadly virus that swept through Hong Kong and struck fear into millions of air passengers. Within a few weeks of the initial panic, the UK firm Land Instruments sold about 50 of its thermal imaging systems to airports in the Asia and iddle East. This has an advantage in that this equipment, which includes a finely tuned infra-red camera, was used to quickly scan passengers and identify any with even the slightest hint of a fever. The Sars threat has abated, but the cameras are still in use, says Gary Chamberlain, of Land Instruments. “Its a virus and could mutate and return at some point.” This technology could be used in future to pinpoint possible terrorists, who might be sweating before boarding. (Duffy, James, 2003) Some disadvantages of this maybe that it can get the wrong person in that the person could be sweating from a fear of flying.
Another new criminal identification procedure that security personnel are using is facial scanning. The human face has 80 so-called landmarks including the bridge and tip of the nose, the size of the mouth and eyes, and the cheekbones. This machine scans 15 faces at a time, comparing them to a database of images at the rate of a million faces a second, face recognition technology needs only 14 to 20 of those 80 landmarks to spot a face authorities are looking for. “We dont have the fingerprints of terrorist groups. But we do have the pictures of terrorist groups,” said Joseph Atick, chairman and CEO of
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Visionics Corp., which markets face recognition equipment. The technology is so precise, Atick says, that it cant be fooled by disguises such as wigs or fake beards. It is just one example of whats called biometrics, the process of identifying people by unique physical characteristics. A fingerprint, for example, is a biometric, as is DNA. (George, 2001)
Advantages of facial scanning are that it is able to pick out a face in the crowd and that when a match is made it alerts the proper people. A few disadvantages are that performance decreases linearly as the enrollment database size goes up. Also another disadvantages is two-dimensional things can be easily fooled. “Big Brother” is another disadvantage.
Biometric technology has replaced badges and ID cards for employees at many airports. Frequent travelers can bypass immigration procedures at nearly a dozen North American airports by registering their palm prints with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Biometrics backers say this kind of technology is the key to increasing airport security. (George, 2001) There are many advantages to the Biometric technology. Personal identification has taken the form of secret passwords and PINs. Everyday examples requiring a password include the ATM, the cellular phone, or internet access on a personal computer. In order that a password cannot be guessed, it should be as long as possible, not appear in a dictionary, and include symbols such as +, -, %, or #. (RILEEN Innovative Technologies, Inc, 2004)
There is a solution that returns to the ways of nature. In order to identify an individual, humans differentiate between physical features such as facial structure or sound of the voice. Biometrics, as the science of measuring and compiling distinguishing physical features, now recognizes many further features as ideal for the definite
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identification of even an identical twin. Examples include a fingerprint, the iris, and vein structure. In order to perform recognition tasks at the level of the human brain 100 million computations per second are required. Only recently have standard PCs reached this speed, and at the same time, the