Surveillance Cameras Are Now Watching your Emotions

As time passes, it becomes more relevant that George Orwell was right, while writing his famous book. It was a big brother who was watching us constantly, by every corner of the street and every place we go. Though, now it is the big cams and CCTVs watching us. While the observations’ means have changed, the concept and the result still remains the same. We are being controlled, checked, and observed.

The facial recognition system is one of the most common security systems in the world. Industries all over the world try to make the CCTV cameras and observation methods as sophisticated as possible. This is due to security measures as well as the control mechanism. The measures are all set by the local governments as well as the private sectors. Many developers and software engineers have come up with certain new ideas and new products for the control of people.

The facial recognition system becomes a more and more important part of every single industry. This is mainly because many threats which still exist in the online industries and via social networks especially. The facial recognition cameras are used in many industries, they can be used physically as well as online. With the development of technologies and the engineering sphere, it became possible to seek additional security measures and to compete with each other in making a better product. There are some companies and some products which claim to be capable of recognizing people’s faces, age, gender, and even emotional state. This might be something surreal, but think twice and it should sound relatively realistic already.

Image Analysis

Not only above the mentioned industries are involved in facial recognition system usage, but some of the major companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have an image analysis platform that claims to detect the age, gender, and the attention of the customers. This is calculated and guessed via the facial metrics, which is analyzed by the cameras. Boston-based Affectiva, an AI company that focuses on emotional analysis, offers emotion detection as a cloud service, allowing customers to upload massive archives of surveillance video and get back analytics tracking the emotional states of everyone appearing in them.

This is not new at all. It was several years ago that the first smartphone to identify the face and the iris of the person for phone unlocking purposes. This was a great innovation back then. There are smart cameras that can detect the cars and find similar cars or the illegal activity of the car on any road basically, so no one was supposed to buy a more sophisticated product.

Surveillance cameras are made for identifying persons, in spite of the location and the state of a person. Those cameras can easily conclude who is the person and find the movement and even the trajectory of the person. There is yet another question and topic of discussion, which is all about NTechLab being real and accurate with the metrics and conclusions. No camera is sophisticated enough to give a 100% result. It might even be hard to reach 80% accuracy in some cases. This means that the Russian company might actually be hiding certain features or simply boasting too much. It is whether one or another.

Go beyond

If only this was not enough and you think that there is still nothing unusual about this, then make sure to sit well in your chair. The Israeli firm Faception company introduced the new camera, with the AI integrated features. The company claims that the camera is capable of determining if the person has any likelihood of committing the crime. This should sound very strange and should be very difficult to believe, but the company claims that the cameras can do it. This is all about facial features and shape. While the idea has been introduced, it is still very discredited and considered as being unethical.

There are quite a few pilot versions of both the NTechLab cameras, as well as Israeli cameras. Many corporations and companies are actively using it. All of the biometrics are included and written in the database. This has become the main source of companies and people looking for models or for workers in certain fields and for certain roles. It is said that the company has provided all of the necessary documents and the legal material from the governmental side.

One way or another, we go back to George Orwell and his big brother. While we are in the digital era and we all seem to have our privacy, it is hard to boast of privacy with the big cameras constantly watching you and controlling your emotions. The privacy researchers also have their own opinion regarding the topic, which is far from being positive. Indeed, facial recognition is completely different from emotional analysis. Turns out Lady Gaga was also right with her Poker Face.