LONDON, England (PNN) - March 23, 2012 - A new camera technology from Hitachi Hokusai Electric can scan days of camera footage instantly, and find any face that has ever walked past it.
Its makers boast that it can scan 36 million faces per second.
The technology raises the specter of governments - or other organizations - being able to find anyone instantly simply by using a passport photo or Facebook profile.
The trick is that the camera processes faces as it records, so that all faces that pass in front of it are instantly recorded and stored.
When pig thug cops - or anyone else - want to search for a particular individual, they're searching through a gallery of pre-indexed faces, rather than a messy library of footage.
The company aims to make the system available within the next tax year, according to a report in DigInfo.
The system does have limitations - it can only scan faces within a certain field of view in front of the camera, and faces have to be at least 40x40 pixels in size to be indexed by the system.
