TED Whiting is director of surveillance at Las Vegas’s Aria casino in Vegas. The control room works like London: everyone is observed in a hunt for the cheats:
Despite that, Whiting says facial recognition software hasn’t been of much use to him. It’s simply too unreliable when it comes to spotting people on the move, in crowds, and under variable lighting. Instead, he and his team rely on pictures shared from other casinos, as well as through the Biometrica and Griffin databases. (The Griffin database, which contains pictures and descriptions of various undesirables, used to go to subscribers as massive paper volumes.) But quite often, they’re not looking for specific people, but rather patterns of behavior. “Believe it or not, when you’ve done this long enough,” he says, “you can tell when somebody’s up to no good. It just doesn’t feel right.”
With face-recognition technology, casinos can spot the big hitters when they arrive. Shop workers can spot shoplifters. But everyone get observed by the eyes in the sky. Everyone is a potential criminal:
They keep a close eye on the tables, since that’s where cheating’s most likely to occur. With 1080p high-definition cameras, surveillance operators can read ...
