Comment by treis
6 years ago
This seems similar to self-driving cars where people hold the computer to much higher standards than humans. I don't have solid proof, but I suspect that using facial recognition with a reasonable confidence threshold and reasonable source images is more accurate than eyewitness ID. If for no other reason than the threshold for a positive eyewitness ID is laughably bad.
The current best practice is to have a witness pick out the suspect from 6 photos. It should be immediately obvious that right off the bat there's a 17% chance of the witness randomly picking the "right" person. It's a terrible way to do things and it's no surprise that people are wrongly convicted again and again on eyewitness testimony.
You need a much higher standard standard of accuracy for facial recognition because it is applied indiscriminately to a large population. If it has 99.9% accuracy and you apply it to a population of 10,000 people, you will get on average 10 false positives.