The “10-year-challenge” posts currently trending on social media are ideal learning materials to teach machines to help catch criminals.
The posts, trending on Facebook and Twitter since the beginning of January, asks users to share photos of themselves from 2008, and then again in 2018.
Highly accurate facial recognition systems already exist, and the technology is already in everyday use, such as for unlocking your phone just by showing it your face, but they rarely take into account ageing.
The 10-year-challenge provides a huge amount of data easily identified with keywords such as “me in 2008” and “me in 2018”
This is in contrast to typical Facebook photos, which may not be posted chronologically, or profile pictures that often don’t feature the user themselves.
The 10-year-challenge information, and systems developed using it, could help law enforcement agencies across the world identify criminals or missing people who’ve aged.
Facial recognition is already widely used to catch criminals around the world.
In 2017, Chinese authorities used facial recognition to arrest 25 suspects who had been avoiding arrest, including a man who had been on the run for a quarter of a century. Qingdao authorities say their system has a 98.1% accuracy rate.