The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are testing facial-recognition technology using booking photographs collected by Canadian police agencies as it considers a future national facial-identification service.
The project, disclosed in the RCMP’s departmental plan, says the force will “collaborate with multiple vendors” to review booking photographs collected from law-enforcement agencies across Canada.
According to the plan, competing algorithms will be tested for “quality, performance, accuracy and demographic bias in a Canadian context.” The RCMP says security and privacy protections will be in place to protect the test data.
But the plan does not say which private companies they’re collaborating with, how many booking photographs are being used in these tests, or which police agencies supplied them.
