Facial Recognition in Greece (Law Enforcement)
Information Certainty: Documented
Deployment Purpose: Criminal investigations
| Summary |
|---|
| 0 |
Products and Institutions:
| Product Deployed | Fire Exos II |
|---|---|
| Institutions ⠉ | Unidas |
| Datasets | Unknown Dataset 0096 |
| Search software |
Status and Events:
| Status | Ongoing |
|---|---|
| Events | Start (1 January 2019, Documented, ?, No description) |
| Start Date | |
| End Date |
Users:
| Involved Entities | |
|---|---|
| Managed by | Hellenic Police Forensic Science Division Video and Image Laboratory (Greek Police) |
| Used by |
Location:
| City | Athens |
|---|---|
| Country ⠉ | Greece |
Description[ ]
Description[edit | ]
At the present time, FR is carried out by forensic examiners of the Video and Image Laboratory of the Audiovisual Evidence of the Department of Photography and Modus Operandi of the Hellenic Police Forensic Science Division. The number of examiners is 4 (with 2 licences in use).
The Fire Exos II software from Unidas is used for both database management and for the searches.
Only frontal view images are used for FR. A probe image can be processed (with Photoshop) either before or after it has been enrolled by using filters, cropping etc. Both possibilities (processing before and after enrolling) are allowed and used in practice.
There are no strict rules set for the number of posts in the candidate list. The length of the list depends on the quality of the probe image as well as on each individual examiner. Thus, hundreds of candidates may need to be examined. There is no standardised threshold set for the search results and the criteria for a "match" is decided by the examiner. Also, the "lights out" scenario is not used.
The search results are reported as a "match", "likely candidate" or "no result". The most common reported result is "likely candidate". The results are reported to the prosecutors and the police for investigative purposes. However, the reported information can be used in court as evidence.
At the time of the interview, the FR system had been used for less than a year and therefore no annual statistics were available relating to the number of searches, the number of hits and the match rate.
Photographs from civil databases can be used for manual 1:1 facial image comparisons, but not for database searches.1
References
- ^ "Summary Report of the project “Towards the European Level Exchange of Facial Images” (TELEFI)". (2021) <https://www.telefi-project.eu/sites/default/files/TELEFI_SummaryReport.pdf> Accessed: 2021-03-12