Bangalore: Coming are the days of face recognition, the new password- your Smartphone scans your face for unlocking itself, the security cameras use face recognition for authentication. Altogether it seems like “’Face Recognition is now,’” says Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University.

Believe him, the epic scenes from Sci-Fi movies, where a criminal is recognized among thousands, within seconds, just with a digital picture is going to be true, as FBI is rolling out its latest $1 billion project on Next Generation Identification (NGI) programme. The programme will also add biometrics such as iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification to the toolkit. It has already begun uploading thousands of pictures into the server and the service is supposed to be rolled out nationwide by 2014.

According to FBI officers, they are keen to track suspects by picking their face from the crowd. It works like this: images of a person of interest from security cameras or public photos uploaded onto the internet could be compared against a national repository of images held by the FBI. An algorithm would perform an automatic search and return a list of potential hits for an officer to sort through and use as possible leads for an investigation. The FBI hasn't shared details of the algorithms it is using, but its technology could be very accurate if applied to photographs taken in controlled situations such as passport photos or police shots.

Even though such security advancements help easy and fast recognition of criminals and prevent crimes, security and privacy advocates are concerned about the people who will be caught on camera alongside the suspected person.  

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