Biometric modalities are commonplace in modern society, providing various industry applications. The most notable of these use cases is its use in providing security to prohibited areas or face ID on smartphones.
There are different biometric modalities, the three main ones being the iris, fingerprint, and face. This article will predominantly focus on face recognition and verification.
How does face recognition software work?
The aim of any biometric system is to capture, map and analyze an individual's identity through the biometrics provided. In this case, a person will have their face scanned and analyzed by a camera equipped with a specialist AI system that performs the facial recognition and authentication test.The image taken by the system can be captured in two or even three dimensions and compared against a specific database of faces. Authentication will be provided if there is a successful match, but nonetheless, recognition is carried out each time a person's face is captured, mapped, and analyzed.
We all have a unique identity, and specialist AI software has been developed to recognize and record certain facial features such as the bridge and shape of the nose, distance, spacing between the eyes, contour of the lips, and much more.
Advanced facial recognition systems can accurately detect faces at various angles and even with a facial mask on!
Popular use cases of face recognition
As we touched on before, there are various applications for facial recognition technology. One of these is the security for unlocking your smartphone via face ID. Nowadays, smartphones encompass all of our private information and are a precious item of property to anyone who owns one. You want to keep this as secure as possible if it falls into the wrong hands and someone tries to unlock it. This is why smartphone manufacturers upgraded the phone unlocking process from pin to face ID because the latter is far harder to breach.You can also use face recognition technology for attendance monitoring and user authentication in the workplace. Accurately managing employees' attendance can help improve your business's practice if you have measures in place that enable employees to take full responsibility for their attendance during their scheduled working hours. Outdated attendance monitoring methods such as clock-in machines are easy to fall victim to 'buddy punching,' unlike the biometric identification of each user.
Testing for the algorithm accuracy
Given the popularity and widespread use of biometric technologies like facial recognition, there are a considerable amount of companies that provide this service. This involves the creation of algorithms, and the better the algorithm, the more of a likelihood that the software performs better too.Due to the saturation of this industry, there must be governing bodies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They assess numerous areas of biometrics and provide testing of different kinds. Companies can voluntarily share their results like this FRVT example here. A Facial Recognition Vendors Test (FRVT) is just one of the biometric assessments NIST carries out.
It is intriguing how this industry will keep evolving in time and whether the complexity of the algorithm code and software continues to improve, resulting in even better software and broader industry use. Make sure to stay tuned!
