The third season of The Capture: Facial recognition and AI experts decipher the facts from the fiction

BBC conspiracy thriller drama The Capture is back for a third series. The first two series captivated viewers with a story that linked police investigations, facial recognition and deepfake AI technology.

As experts in facial recognition and AI, we separate the fact from the fiction ahead of the new season.

Fans of The Capture will be familiar with scenes in which investigators use facial recognition software to identify the people they are pursuing in London – soldier Shaun Emery (Callum Turner) in the first season and Russian mercenary Nikolai Mirsky (Jack Sandle) in the second season.

Real facial recognition

A real facial recognition job involves several steps. An operator first uploads an image to facial recognition software, which looks for the presence of a face. Features are then extracted from each detected face and compared with features of faces from a stored database. Features are things that the algorithm has identified as…