Face recognition failure

The idea of biometrics is kewl, but its practical application as of late has a long ways to go. With it being so easy to fake fingerprints, iris scan false-positives and face recognition software failing... it is just not mature enough yet.

The Tampa Tribute just ran an article in which the Tampa Police Department has eliminated the facial-recognition software hooked up to 36 cameras scanning crowds in Ybor City - after two years, zero arrests and zero positive identifications.

This is where I believe the vendor/manufacturer has failed the security community and more importantly, their client. It appears that they went and sold a system, and never followed up to work out the kinks and make their product better. To go 2 years without a single positive match has to bode poorly on the product. Do they even care about their client? Maybe this is unfair of me to say because I am not there, but I wouldn't let a huge opportunity like a case study with the Tampa police go by the wayside without doing everything I could to work it out. Besides, that would only help the product along in its hardening cycle.

Goes to show you that yet again a biometric implementation has failed, and isn't ready commercially yet. Are we actually moving forward with this stuff, or taking a step back when this sort of thing happens? Of course, maybe Tampa's policing is so good that they drove out every criminal. Ya I doubt it too.