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Facial recognition technology — a primer
7 February 2019 (Brussels, Belgium) – Facial recognition technology was much discussed over the last two weeks at the four events that kicked of my conference coverage: the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland; the International Cybersecurity Forum in Lille, France; LegalTech in New York; and the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference in Brussels, Belgium.
It is also on my agenda next week at the Munich Security Conference and then the Big Daddy … the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain
The video above is a short “explainer” (with help from our friends at Herta Security), and it will be one of three areas that will be our focus this year at MWC. We had fun doing this video … and you get to see some amazing work from my graphics department, and also meet some members of my team.
Facial recognition in most cases is well-intended and is meant to make life easier. However, the nature of this technology poses a threat to the anonymity of those using it and therefore raises data privacy issues. Uses of the technology such as China’s proposed facial recognition database which is intended to be able to identify any of the country’s 1.3 billion citizens in 3 seconds or less (see the full story on our resource page; the link is below) have raised those privacy concerns.
One of the biggest selling points of facial recognition technology (at least from the vendor’s standpoint) is that it works at a distance. This negates the need for the direct contact necessary with any security system such as fingerprint scanners.
As we discuss in the video above, facial recognition systems work by creating a blueprint of sorts of a face. As the motion graphic in the video shows you, this is done by taking an image with a camera and then measuring distances on a face, known as nodal points, including between eyes and the width of noses.
While initially a form of computer application, it has seen wider uses in recent times on mobile platforms and in other forms of technology, such as robotics. It is typically used as access control in security systems and can be compared to other biometrics such as fingerprint or eye iris recognition systems. Although the accuracy of facial recognition system as a biometric technology is lower than iris recognition and fingerprint recognition, it is widely adopted due to its contactless and non-invasive process. Recently, it has also become popular as a commercial identification and marketing tool. Other applications include advanced human-computer interaction, video surveillance, automatic indexing of images, and video database, among others.
Facial recognition technology is a complex area so to assist you my team has assembled a resource page (it will be continually updated) which you can access by clicking here.
And if you’d like to do a video interview at MWC we have a few (just a few) time slots open so please drop us an email at: [email protected]
