Face recognition from DNA: One company’s working on it – PS News

Tate Ryan-Mosley* says that while the tech almost certainly wont work, it is a telling sign of where the field is heading.

A police officer is at the scene of a murder. No witnesses. No camera footage. No obvious suspects or motives.

Just a bit of hair on the sleeve of the victims jacket. DNA from the cells of one strand is copied and compared against a database. No match comes back, andthe case goes cold.

Corsight AI, a facial recognition subsidiary of the Israeli AI company Cortica, purports to be devising a solution for that sort of situation by using DNA to create a model of a face that can then be run through a facial recognition system.

It is a task that experts in the field regard as scientifically untenable.

Corsight unveiled its DNA to Face product in a presentation by chief executive officer Robert Watts and executive vice president Ofer Ronen intended to court financiers at the Imperial Capital Investors Conference in New York City on December 15.

It was part of the companys overall product road map, which also included movement and voice recognition.

The tool constructs a physical profile by analysing genetic material collected in a DNA sample, according to a company slide deck viewed by surveillance research group IPVM and shared with MIT Technology Review.

Corsight declined a request to answer questions about the presentation and its product road map.

We are not engaging with the press at the moment as the details of what we are doing are company confidential, Watts wrote in an email.

But marketing materials show that the company is focused on government and law enforcement applications for its technology.

Its advisory board consists only of James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, and Oliver Revell, a former assistant director of the FBI.

The science that would be needed to support such a system doesnt yet exist, however, and experts say the product would exacerbate the ethical, privacy, and bias problems facial recognition technology already causes.

More worryingly, its a signal of the industrys ambitions for the future, where face detection becomes one facet of a broader effort to identify people by any available meanseven inaccurate ones.

This story wasjointly reported with Donald Maye of IPVM who reportedthat prior to this presentation, IPVM was unaware of a company attempting to commercialize a face recognition product associated with a DNA sample.

A chequered past

Corsights idea is not entirely new.

Human Longevity, a genomics-based, health intelligence company founded by Silicon Valley celebrities Craig Venter andPeter Diamandis, claimed to haveused DNA to predict facesin 2017.

MIT Technology Review reported then thatexperts, however, were doubtful.

A former employee of Human Longevity said the company cant pick a person out of a crowd using a genome, and Yaniv Erlich, chief science officer of the genealogy platform MyHeritage,published a response laying out major flawsin the research.

A small DNA informatics company, Parabon NanoLabs, provides law enforcement agencies with physical depictions of people derived from DNA samples through a product line called Snapshot, which includes genetic genealogy as well as 3D renderings of a face.

(Parabonpublishes some cases on its websitewith comparisons between photos of people the authorities are interested in finding and renderings the company has produced.)

Parabons computer-generated composites also come with a set of phenotypic characteristics, like eye and skin colour, that are given a confidence score.

For example, a composite might say that theres an 80 per cent chance the person being sought has blue eyes.

Forensic artists also amend the composites to create finalized face models that incorporate descriptions of nongenetic factors, like weight and age, whenever possible.

Parabons website claims its software is helping solve an average of one case per week, and Ellen McRae Greytak, the companys director of bioinformatics, says it has solved over 200 cases in the past seven years, though most are solved with genetic genealogy rather than composite analysis.

Greytak says the company has come under criticism for not publishing its proprietary methods and data; she attributes that to a business decision.

Parabon does not package face recognition AI with its phenotyping service, and it stipulates that its law enforcement clients should not use the images it generates from DNA samplesas an input into face recognition systems.

Parabons technology doesnt tell you the exact number of millimeters between the eyes or the ratio between the eyes, nose, and mouth, Greytak says.

Without that sort of precision, facial recognition algorithms cannot deliver accurate resultsbut deriving such precise measurements from DNA would require fundamentally new scientific discoveries, she says, and the papers that have tried to do prediction at that level have not had a lot of success.

Greytak says Parabon only predicts the general shape of someones face (though thescientific feasibility of such prediction has also been questioned).

Police have been known to run forensic sketches based on witness descriptions through facial recognition systems.

A2019 study from Georgetown Laws Center on Privacy and Technologyfound that at least half a dozen police agencies in the US permit, if not encourage using forensic sketches, either hand drawn or computer generated, as input photos for face recognition systems.

AI experts have warned that such a process likelyleads to lower levels of accuracy.

Corsight also has been criticized in the past for exaggerating the capabilities and accuracy of its face recognition system, which it calls the most ethical facial recognition system for highly challenging conditions, according to a slide deckpresentation available online.

In atechnology demo for IPVMlast November, Corsight CEO Watts said that Corsights face recognition system can identify someone with a face masknot just with a face mask, but with a ski mask.

IPVM reported that using Corsights AI on a masked face rendered a 65 per cent confidence score, Corsights own measure of how likely it is that the face captured will be matched in its database, and noted that the mask is more accurately described as a balaclava or neck gaiter, as opposed to a ski mask with only mouth and eye cutouts.

Broader issues with face recognition technologys accuracy have beenwell-documented(including byMIT Technology Review).

They are more pronounced when photographs are poorly lit or taken at extreme angles, andwhen the subjects have darker skin, are women, or are very old or very young.

Privacy advocates and the public have also criticized facial recognition technology, particularly systems likeClearview AIthat scrape social media as part of their matching engine.

Law enforcement use of the technology is particularly fraughtBoston, Minneapolis, and San Francisco are among the many cities that have banned it.

Amazon and Microsoft have stopped selling facial recognition products to police groups, and IBM has taken its face recognition software off the market.

Pseudoscience

The idea that youre going to be able to create something with the level of granularity and fidelity thats necessary to run a face match searchto me, thats preposterous, says Albert Fox Cahn, a civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, who works extensively on issues related to face recognition systems.

That is pseudoscience.

Dzemila Sero, a researcher in theComputational Imaging Groupof Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, says the science to support such a system is not yet sufficiently developed, at least not publicly.

Sero says the catalogue of genes required to produce accurate depictions of faces from DNA samples is currently incomplete, citing Human Longevitys 2017 study.

In addition, factors like the environment and aging have substantial effects on faces that cant be captured through DNA phenotyping, and research has shown that individual genes dont affect the appearance of someones face as much as their gender and ancestry does.

Premature attempts to implement this technique would likely undermine trust and support for genomic research and garner no societal benefit, she told MIT Technology Review in an email.

Sero has studied the reverse concept of Corsights systemface to DNA rather than DNA to faceby matching a set of 3D photographs with a DNA sample.

In a paper inNature, Sero and her team reported accuracy rates between 80 per cent to 83 per cent.

Sero says her work should not be used by prosecutors as incriminating evidence, however, and that these methods also raise undeniable risks of further racial disparities in criminal justice that warrant caution against premature application of the techniques until proper safeguards are in place.

Law enforcement depends on DNA data sets, predominantly the free ancestry website GEDmatch, which was instrumental inthe search for the notorious Golden State Killer.

But even DNA sampling, once consideredthe only form of scientifically rigorous forensic evidenceby the US National Research Council, hasrecently come under criticismfor problems with accuracy.

Fox Cahn, who is currentlysuing the New York Police Departmentto obtain records related to bias in its use of facial recognition technology, says the impact of Corsights hypothetical system would be disastrous.

Gaming out the impact this is going to have, it augments every failure case for facial recognition, says Fox Cahn.

Its easy to imagine how this could be used in truly frightening and Orwellian ways.

The future of face recognition tech

Despite such concerns, the market for face recognition technology is growing, and companies are jockeying for customers.

Corsight is just one of many offering photo-matching services with flashy new features, regardless of whether theyve been shown to work.

Many of these new products look to integrate face recognition with another form of recognition.

The Russia-based facial recognition company NtechLab, for example, offers systems that identify people based on their license plates as well as facial features, and founder Artem Kuharenkotold MIT Technology Review last yearthat its algorithms try to extract as much information from the video stream as possible.

In these systems, facial recognition becomes just one part of an apparatus that can identify people by a range of techniques, fusing personal information across connected databases into a sort of data panopticon.

Corsights DNA to face system appears to be the companys foray into building a futuristic, comprehensive surveillance package it can offer to potential buyers.

But even as the market for such technologies expands, Corsight and others are at increased risk of commercialising surveillance technologies plagued by bias and inaccuracy.

*Tate Ryan-Mosley is a data and audio reporter for MIT Technology Review with a focus on the social impact of new technologies.

This article first appeared at technologyreview.com.

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Face recognition from DNA: One company's working on it - PS News