From Defense One:
City authorities say the planned system will have access to all 160,000 existing cameras.
This year, Moscow will join a growing number of global cities whose populations are monitored by AI-enabled facial recognition programs....MORE
More than 160,000 cameras already watch the capital city’s 12 million people on the streets and in its sprawling subway system, one of the world’s largest. Now Russia’s artificial-intelligence development companies will vie for the chance to have their programs run the show. This points to the growing sophistication of the country’s AI developers and the confidence the government has in implementing such technologies across the country.
Among the top contenders for the job is NtechLab, an AI startup whose FindFace face recognition technology won IARPA’s Face Recognition Challenge Prize in 2017. The following year, it was deployed for the World Cup, and supposedly uncovered property theft and prevented other crimes. In a recent interview with the Russia daily RiaNovosti, CEO Artem Kuharenko said FindFace operates as part of pilot surveillance programs in various Russian cities; in the Tartarstan region alone, he said, nearly 2,000 crimes were solved last year with the help of video surveillance.
Another contender is IVA Cognitive, which develops the IVA CV video analytics system. In the RiaNovosti interview, IVA’s CEO Alexey Tsessarsky speculated that “perhaps the city will choose one company or organize something like a consortium of several companies. The officials will divide the cameras between companies to see how each copes with the task. Thus, the competition will continue, and the technology will continue to develop.”
Tsessarsky said Moscow authorities want the facial-recognition system primarily to prevent and solve crimes. “The video stream from all connected cameras is analyzed, faces are recognized and saved for some time in the database,” he said. “Then a photo of a person from the wanted list is loaded into the system and a search is performed among the accumulated history. The program shows which cameras and when they saw this person. You can restore his travel route, determine where and when he was last, download a video from there and see what he did there.”...
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