Government’s new facial-recognition system had no difficulty identifying this creature from the movie “The Werewolf of London” as…
… actor Henry Hull.
WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security has quietly developed facial recognition software that can identify people even after they’ve transformed into werewolves!
In a dazzling demonstration of the system, it corectly picked out Hollywood stars after analyzing photos of them in werewolf makeup.
“This will be an invaluable tool for law enforcement,” confirmed a DHS insider.
But not everyone is impressed with the Hair Penetration Analyzer, or HPA, which cost the government a whopping $17 million to develop.
“In the past 100 years there have been only four verified cases of werewolf attacks,” declared Albert Schicklebaus of the watchdog group Citizens for Prudent Use of Taxpayer Funds. “For Uncle Sam to spend such a huge amount of the public’s hard-earned dollars on something like this borders on the ridiculous.”
Facial recognition software has been used by authorities for more than a decade and was deployed by the FBI to pick out known terrorists among spectators at Super Bowl XXXV as far back as 2001. A video image of a person’s face is analyzed and rapidly compared to a database of suspects. Complex algorithms identify facial features by extracting “landmarks” such as the relative position, size, and shape of the eyes, nose, cheekbones, and jaw. Until now, excessive facial hair interfered with this analysis.
The software compared this image to thousands of headshots of Hollywood actors and correctly picked out…
…a young Michael Landon, star of “Teenage Werewolf.”
“HPA obviously has broader applications,” said the Department of Homeland Security source. “Now if a terror suspect in our database shaves his beard and walks through an airport, we’ll easily be able to identify him.”
But why focus on werewolves? The expert likened the approach to the Centers for Disease Control’s recent use of a zombie apocalypse scenario to train emergency responders.
“No one criticized the CDC for that,” he pointed out. “Using a bit of whimsy this way injects much-needed lightheartedness into an otherwise grim matter such as terrorism.”
— C. Michael Forsyth
Who could that be under all that hair?
GOTCHA! The Department of Homeland Security had no trouble picking out Lon Chaney, star of “The Wolfman” out of 10,000 photos.
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