Police use of automated facial recognition is legal, Cardiff High Court decides

The High Court in Cardiff has now found that South Wales Police’s use to date of automated facial recognition (AFR) has been consistent with the requirements of the Human Rights Act and data protection legislation, a government report reveals.

It also found that the current legal regime is adequate to ensure the appropriate and non-arbitrary use of the AFR system that has been used in trials by South Wales Police.

According to the UK Government’s Office of the Biometrics Commissioner, whilst South Wales Police should be commended for the thoughtful, considered way in which they have carried out their trials to date there remains a wider issue, which is not limited to whether there is a legal basis for the police to carry out trials of AFR.

The bigger question going forward is whether there should be a specific legal framework for the police (and others) to routinely deploy new biometrics including AFR but also voice recognition, gait analysis, iris analysis or other new biometric technologies as they emerge.

CCTV Surveillance – The experts in deploying Facial Recognition CCTV systems

The Facial Recognition CCTV solution supplied by CCTV Surveillance dynamically compares images of individuals from incoming video streams against those stored in a predefined access control list and immediately sends alerts when a positive match occurs.

The technology yields a very good level of performance despite partial occlusions of the face, the use of glasses, scarves or caps, changes of facial expression, and moderate rotations of the face. Moreover, it does not allow users to be impersonated using photographs.

This biometric access control technology is the perfect solution to control the access to restricted security areas, especially since we’re talking about a completely automated system that requires very little interaction with the operator.

Our Facial Recognition CCTV system can be easily integrated with existing ID management products and enables administrators to easily create Whitelists/Blacklists for specific areas, while subjects can be very easily enrolled from one or more photographs.

The system fully supports runtime alarm management, is highly tunable (control based on time-frames, sequentially, etc) and even allows alarms to be exported to common formats (PDF, Excel) and remote devices (mobile, PDA, tablet, security control centre).