Meet the winners of the biggest ever face-recognition challenge

The results are in from the biggest computer face-recognition contest to date. Everyone from government agencies to police forces are looking for software to track us in airports or spot us in CCTV images. But much of this technology is developed behind closed doors – how can we know if any of it really works? To answer this question, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been running the biggest face-recognition competition to date. The Face Recognition Prize Challenge tested two tasks: face verification and face search. Face verification is what phone manufacturers such as Apple – whose iPhone X, out last week, can be unlocked with your face – are trying to master.