Like many cities, Moscow has an enormous network of CCTV cameras, but unlike many cities, thousands of those cameras are now hooked up to a powerful facial recognition system that can track criminals (and trash collectors) wherever they go. The privacy implications are serious, of course, but a large scale rollout like this will help make them part of the public discussion.
The facial recognition system, devised by Russian AI firm NTechLab (previously), has actually been in use since early this year as a pilot program, but is now in official use. I spoke with Artem Ermolaev, CIO of the city’s Department of Information Technologies, about the reasoning behind doing this.
He explained that with over 160,000 cameras in the city’s CCTV network, and five full days of video kept from them at all times, the sheer volume of footage is difficult to navigate.
“The issue is that it takes lots of hours to look through in the archive,” he said. “That’s why we started the project pilot — it helps us organize the video.”
Facial recognition and city-wide camera networks stoke fears of constant surveillance, and of course those are valid. But this is a rather limited deployment: only two to four thousand cameras can be actively monitored at once. The massive computing power that would be required to tag every face in every frame of the millions of hours of video generated every day makes it prohibitive.
So the system works using manual queries. If the police, for instance, know that certain criminal has entered Moscow, they enter the face into the system and activate the cameras he or she is most likely to appear on. The system runs through the footage of those two thousand cameras and monitors...