Could facial recognition help find man sought in UnitedHealthcare CEO’s killing in New York?
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Officers with the New York Police Department search an area in Central Park in Manhattan on Dec 6, where they found a backpack believed to have been ditched by the suspect.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
NEW YORK – A man whom police are seeking in connection to the brazen killing of Mr Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, has passed by numerous surveillance cameras while in Manhattan.
Could artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition put a name to the man whose identity has so far eluded authorities?
Police have released two surveillance camera stills in which the entire face of a person they are seeking is visible, including one in which he is smiling. Both images are grainy, and his face is captured from a sharply downward angle.
Professor Anil Jain, an expert on facial recognition technology at Michigan State University, said the photo in which the man is smiling contains enough detail for a facial recognition system to yield potential results.
“The challenge will be which face database to search against,” Prof Jain said. Law enforcement officials could search the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) mug shot database, the driver’s licence databases of New York state and neighboring states, or public photos on the internet using a system such as Clearview AI.
A facial recognition search would yield a list of people deemed similar looking to the person in the original photo. Police would need to find other evidence to tie a person identified that way to the crime, Prof Jain said, or run the risk of making a wrongful arrest.
Other experts disagreed about how useful the images could be for identifying the man.
Carnegie Mellon University’s technology and policy professor Alessandro Acquisti said the photos shared with the public would not be enough to uniquely identify the man because they were not full-frontal images. They could, though, help to “restrict the pool of likely suspects,” he said.
Mr Giorgi Gobronidze, CEO of PimEyes, a face search engine that anyone can use to find photos of a person on the internet, was skeptical that the poor-quality images would produce reliable results. A facial recognition system performs best with a high-resolution photo of someone looking directly into a camera.
He also said automated facial recognition would only work if the images of the person were in the database being searched.
“If the person in the image has little to no online presence,” he said, PimEyes “won’t be able to find anything.” NYTIMES
