Google Earth now has the capability to display satellite images of people/faces and license plates for a given location on Earth.
Presumably, facial recognition technology can be used to identify people whose faces can be seen in the images. However, how long before a scan is possible to determine if a particular individual at a given location is, in fact, a person that is wanted by authorities? It may sound crazy, but if you said 15 years ago that you'd be able to punch in an address on your computer and get a satellite image of your house and yard, with the detail to be able to see a person in the yard, people would have thought you crazy....
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
2007-05-31 04:16:43 · 2 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics ➔ Engineering
The software to recognize people from images and even videos already exists. The only impediment to identification on a massive scale is the absence of samples (e.g., people submitting their photos to Google Earth). Also consider the computational burden this will place upon Google. They will need powerful computers to sift through the mountain of visual data. For what? To identify some hot guy/chick you saw the other day? Not a good use of computer resources if you ask me. Furthermore, there may be public backlash against this kind of identification. In short, I think the means will appear soon, they will be used first by the government (and they already are on a smaller scale), then there will be debates over how far we want this thing to go, then before we can do anything about it, it will already be commonplace.
By the way, this is not the same as DNA identification, but facial recognition technology is already pretty accurate.
2007-05-31 04:30:14 · answer #1 · answered by Emre S 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Google earth photos are not real time and many of the photo's are from airplanes. Many of them are years old. They cannot be used to locate anyone.
2007-05-31 12:15:23 · answer #2 · answered by Gene 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋