The facial or face recognition system is another example of the technological advancements of the twenty-first century. It is basically a system which is capable enough of matching and recognizing the identity of a certain individual with help of their face. The identification process can be used to match faces of people in pictures, videos or even in real time. Law enforcement agencies also use the system to identify a face against a database of hundreds of faces.
The distinctive facial features of an individual are taken in consideration by measuring and pinpointing them with some other image. Facial recognition actually falls under biometric security. Biometric security is a category, which includes several biometric soft ware’s like recognizing a person through their voice or voice recognition, fingerprint recognition and iris recognition.
How does the process of Facial Recognition work?
• Detecting the face through an image: The camera captures an image of a person’s face either through photos, videos or real-time.
• Analyzing the face: After capturing the image the face recognition system starts analyzing and determining several features of the face like the eye location, distance between the eyebrows, depth of the eye socket and more. The aim of this step is to identify the distinctive features of one’s face
• Conversion of the image: The image is now converted to grayscale into a set of digital information based on the person’s facial features. After this a numerical code which is also known as face print is formed.
• Comparison with the database: The next step in this process involves using the search engine to compare the newly formed face print with that of the other faces which are already present in the database. This step can be time consuming sometimes because these databases contain millions of photos, videos with which the face print is being compared.
Some common uses of the facial recognition technology are given below:
• Mobiles with face unlock: Almost every other phone nowadays has a face unlock feature. It did not much time for this feature to get popular among customers. This is because it ensured them with a powerful way of protecting their personal data. Even if the phone gets stolen, it is nearly impossible for someone else except the owner to unlock it.
• Banks: Customers of a bank can authorize all of their transactions with help of facial recognition through their mobiles or computers. Without the use of one time passwords or OTPs the chances of the data getting compromised by reaching out to hackers, gets significantly lower. According to some, this technology can also help to replace debit and credit cards in the future.
• Airports: Number of airports throughout the world is seen using the facial recognition system for making the travelling process much faster and easier than before for their customers. With increasing number of travelers each day it could be quite probable that biometric passwords would allow them to reduce the time wasted in long queues before boarding a flight.
• Law enforcement: Several law enforcement agencies nowadays regularly use the facial recognition system. The federal and state databases contain millions of face prints allowing the agencies to easily match them with the person they are looking for. Some officers even have this system in their smart phones or any other portable device for that matter.
• Health care services: Facial recognition even helps hospitals to maintain proper records of their patients along with their reports. There are certain apps too which helps a person to register and get themselves or anyone else admitted in hospitals through this system.
• Home or office security: The biometric technology is used by some households and offices too. This is because the conventional methods like using keys, Identity cards cannot be much reliable if they are lost by the owner. Face recognition system suppliers at such a time can be of great help to such owners. They can help in installing CCTVs with the facial recognition system in it. This would help to detect the faces of each and every person who visits the place, thus making it difficult for any kind of theft to take place.
