The language used by the PIO is worrying, but further down in the article he explains that they don't use the software for "matching". And that makes sense... Instead of filtering out all but the best matches by setting the confidence threshold really high, you set it much lower and sift the results manually.
This is essential just a tool to quickly filter a very large data set down to possible matches. Interestingly enough, the police and many of the letter agencies have already had software that does this for over 25 years. Rekogition will likely perform better, but it still seems weird to me that Amazon would make this move at all. What is the impetus? They obviously aren't going to make money off of this, compared to their other income sources.
This is essential just a tool to quickly filter a very large data set down to possible matches. Interestingly enough, the police and many of the letter agencies have already had software that does this for over 25 years. Rekogition will likely perform better, but it still seems weird to me that Amazon would make this move at all. What is the impetus? They obviously aren't going to make money off of this, compared to their other income sources.