Biometric facial recognition; sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it? Even if you’ve not heard about it or know how it works, you must have used it.
Do you want to know where?
Remember that computer vision feature called FaceID that helps you unlock your phone by holding it up to your face; yeah, that’s biometric facial recognition.
As the world progresses, people look for more ways to efficiently deal with their everyday tasks. Biometric facial recognition is a step towards modernization and a technology that is helping people save time and increase the standard of work done.
So, what exactly is facial recognition? It identifies an individual by using technology. This system uses biometrics to read your facial features from an image or video, and then compares it to a database of faces to find a match.
Biometric facial recognition is generally used to protect an application, device or system and its applications go way beyond just unlocking your phone.
Slowly and gradually, it’s making way into different businesses and is increasing the standard of living.
Listed below are few, of the numerous ways biometric facial recognition has integrated with our lives.
Applications of biometric facial recognition:
- Airports: At an airport, you might be familiar with waiting in an endless line to get your passport checked.
And then once again waiting in a line while an employee checks the boarding pass of travelers and ushers them into the aircraft.
Too much of a hassle right?
Well, thanks to biometric facial recognition, now you can bid goodbye to these long queues.
It allows passengers to skip these lines and instead walk through an automated e-passport control to reach the gate faster.
Not only does this increase efficiency, but it also increases security as it can immediately identify any criminal or terrorist.
In fact, British airways has put this technology in action and now U.S. passengers get their identity verified by a camera, and enter the aircraft without showing their passport or boarding pass. This way they are able to board almost 240 passengers in 10 minutes.
- Banking: A survey carried out in 2020 revealed that a third of answerers thought their online account, be it social media or banking, will be hacked in 2021.
Facial recognition reduces this risk to a great extent as there are no passwords for hackers to crack. If the hackers somehow manage to steal your database; there is a technique called ‘liveless’ detection that makes sure that the face detected is from a live person and hence avoid impersonation.
Face recognition has the potential to eradicate debt cards and signatures.
- Health care:Biometric facial recognition is proving to be extremely beneficial in improving patient care by hospitals.
It’s helping doctors keep track of patients’ records, use of medicine, as well as their emotions and pain, to support pain management procedures.
Additionally, researchers have successfully used facial recognition software to diagnose different diseases like DiGeorge Syndrome.
So, it’s safe to say that facial recognition is becoming of great importance in the health care industry.
- Law enforcement: Law enforcing agencies are also able to take advantage offacial recognition to find wanted people from crowds. They compare pictures taken from a variety of sources, like social media or traffic cameras, and compare it to their facial recognition databases.
They can also just snap a picture of a pedestrian on their phone and immediately compare the photo to their database. Law enforcement agencies have used facial recognition in many major concerts and sporting events to identify people who might be wanted.
- Retail:Biometric facial recognition is not only making retail safe, but its making it more fun and easy too.
It helps reduce retail crime by immediately identifying, known shoplifters or people with a criminal history, when they enter the store.
Their pictures are matched with a large database of mug shots and the professionals can be alerted as soon as a match is found.
Moving to the fun part, it’s improving retail experience in so many ways starting with the “face pay” technology.
It allows you to skip long lines and get charged to your account by simply scanning your face. Additionally, MAC cosmetics also use this technology to help people virtually try on their makeup and buy what looks best on them.
Conclusion
Biometric facial recognition is a step towards the future and with time, more businesses will find ways to take advantage of this technology. It minimizes a lot of security concerns and saves a lot of time. It’s convenient and a challenge to duplicate. It will be interesting to see how face recognition becomes a major part of our future.
