The UEFA Champions League final will test the effectiveness of facial recognition technology

The next one 3 June, Wales' Millennium Stadium in Cardiff will not only focus global attention on the final of the 62nd edition of the UEFA Champions League, but that of the many security forces that will shield this enclosure and the surroundings of the city to ensure that everything goes smoothly, with the use of automated facial recognition as a key element of the operation.

The possibility of an attack and capturing potential terrorists, in addition to avoiding any vandalism and incident among club fans who reach the final of the 62nd edition of the UEFA Champions League is the main objective of the British police, who will shield days before the final (the next 3 June) both millennium stadium, with the capacity to 74.500 Spectators, like the Welsh city of Cardiff.

Among other measures, facial recognition technology will be one of the protagonists of this operational security complex, which will be used for the first time in such an event and which is based on the automated AFR system that the London Metropolitan Police used during last year's well-known Notting Hill Carnival.

This initiative, which will integrate with the network of surveillance cameras, will comply with national and regulatory legislation for these systems, as British Commissioner Tony Porter has made clear: "we're going to follow the rules of surveillance systems. Using AFR (automated facial recognition) has increased in recent years, and that needs to be improved to achieve more accurate results. Each application requires good algorithms, of an effort dedicated to its design, a multidisciplinary team of experts and limited-sized image databases and field tests to properly calibrate and optimize technology".

The face of thousands of visitors and fans who come to cardiff's final, it is estimated that some 170.000, can be scanned, process your data and match it with a local database of some 500.000 people who have some conflicted history or suspected of terrorism, for which video surveillance cameras located at the city's train station will be used, around the stadium and in the venue itself.

The launch of this pilot project has funding from the Ministry of the Interior for the Welsh police, in order to prove the effectiveness of this live technology and avoid to the maximum incidents such as Borussia Dortmund's recent bus attack before the Champions League quarter-final match against Monaco, where player Marc Bartra and a policeman were injured.

The use of this technology is not majorityly welcome, because in the program report 'Face in video evaluation' (FIVE) NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) , the limitations of the AFR system in the effective identification of so-called 'non-cooperative' subjects are highlighted, I mean, who don't face the camera or whose faces are darkened, something that has so far only been achieved in controlled environments with high-resolution cameras.

The accuracy of facial recognition software has also recently been publicly challenged in the United States during a House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, which noted that the algorithms used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation were inaccurate in a 14% and identified people of color with many mistakes, in addition to the storage of images of millions of innocent people by the authorities, among other reasons.

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