College Students Secretly Photographed For Facial-Recognition Research

As part of a project on facial-recognition technology that received funding from the U.S. government, a researcher at the University of Colorado secretly photographed over 1,700 people as they went about their daily business. According to the Colorado Springs Independent, Dr. Terrance Boult set up a camera on one of the buildings on campus and began recording everybody who walked past it for 20 days in 2012 and 2013.

Boult and his team then began sorting through thousands of images and tried to identify the same people. They found it challenging to identify the same subjects because many of them were looking down at their phones, or had their faces obstructed. That is precisely what Boult wanted as he planned to use the photographs to improve facial-recognition technology by using real-world footage.

Once Boult's team had sorted through the massive collection of photographs, they shared the images with government agencies and private companies who could use them to improve their facial recognition algorithms.

The study has its detractors, with some people suggesting that it is unethical to use people's images for government-backed research without their permission.

"He may be helping them do something that's not right in the first place," Dr. Bernard Chao, who teaches the intersection of law and technology at Denver University told the Denver Post. "I'm not sure I want to be in a state where every place I walk, my picture is being taken and automatically uploaded into facial-recognition software. I actually know I would not like that. I think the response is, 'Maybe we just shouldn't be doing this, period.'"

Boult says that his research falls within the bounds of the law and that he took great efforts to ensure that the privacy of the subjects was maintained. He did not release any of the photographs until the students captured would have graduated and did not name anybody in the images. He also required any organization who used the images to sign a contract stating they would not release them to the public.

“The study is trying to make facial recognition better, especially at long range or surveillance applications,” Boult said. “We wanted to collect a dataset of people acting naturally in public because that’s the way people are trying to use facial recognition.”

Photo: Getty Images