Facial Recognition : Brilliant Future or Privacy Threat?
One of the top tech trends of this decade is Facial Recognition, a growing technology that has already surpassed humans in terms of speed and efficiency. Businesses are being attracted to it from various industries due to its wide array of potential applications.
Facial Recognition Technology has found its most practical use in security and surveillance but tech giants like Apple and Google are also using facial recognition in their mobile devices to verify their user’s identity and provide secure logins to devices.
Facial Recognition has also shown promising results in helping law enforcement agencies in tracking down criminals in just a matter of a few hours.
In general, the benefit of facial recognition technology is a sense of security and safety. And this is achieved through an ever-evolving technology but its huge success and wide array of applications have raised many privacy concerns for privacy rights.
What is Facial Recognition?
Facial Recognition Systems use the face characteristics such as eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, chin, and ears to identify the person’s identity in public settings, this can occur in photos or videos even in real-time video streams.
These automated systems are capable of identifying individuals in various public settings even in crowded and unstable environments and all this in just a split second which already surpasses human-level performance in this task.
But it is worth noting that the technology is not always accurate and could be biased towards a specific section of society if not implemented properly.
It uses a mix of artificial intelligence (AI) and biometric technology to identify human faces through measuring nodal points, the distances between certain facial features. The software analyzes and compares patterns of a person’s facial features to provide accurate verification of their identity.
Is Facial Recognition Future?
The global facial recognition market size was valued at USD 3.86 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.4% from 2021 to 2028. One of the key driving forces supporting this increasing demand for facial recognition is used of recognition-based security and monitoring systems used by business owners to monitor people and identify their faces when they arrive at their stores, apart from this the technology is also increasingly deployed for security purposes.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, facial recognition technologies also increasingly get used in digital healthcare and disease outbreak prevention by combining it with other types of biometrics and in applications, ranging from identifying people with protective headgear to applications including, for instance, temperature detection.
What are the major applications of Facial Recognition?
Facial recognition is a game-changer for law enforcement in tracking criminals and finding missing persons. Airport authorities use facial recognition at security check-ins for international flights. Smart CCTV systems can be used to identify potential evidence in video surveillance.
Zonal access among employees in institutions can be actively controlled with the help of facial recognition. This is a very important task for data centers, research institutes, and banks where access to only authorized personnel is one of the priorities.
A Facial Recognition system can be used in educational institutions for improving the student experience and also monitoring attendance and behavior, thereby increasing learning efficiency and security.
An automatic time and attendance system can be employed to solve employee management tasks like clock in and clock out records, early and extra hours records.
With the increasing computational power of mobile devices deploying on-device facial lock systems is now possible. In spite of the availability of other biometric lock systems available facial recognition is much more preferred because of easy deployment and quick locking and unlocking.
Covid-19 has given a radical boost to digital banking. Even before the pandemic users were engaged in digital banking services but now banking systems have observed a considerable increase in users moving to online banking solutions because of which deploying better customer monitoring and biometric security system is one of the prime needs.
Because of the ability to recognize multiple users in a single frame, emotion monitoring in movie theaters and stadiums is becoming common to analyze crowd sentiment and also get more statistically backed reviews.
Emotion recognition is also being used by hotels and restaurants to get more analytical results for their services.
- Security
-
Facial recognition is a game-changer for law enforcement in tracking criminals and finding missing persons. Airport authorities use facial recognition at security check-ins for international flights. Smart CCTV systems can be used to identify potential evidence in video surveillance.
Zonal access among employees in institutions can be actively controlled with the help of facial recognition. This is a very important task for data centers, research institutes, and banks where access to only authorized personnel is one of the priorities.
- Monitoring & Attendance
-
A Facial Recognition system can be used in educational institutions for improving the student experience and also monitoring attendance and behavior, thereby increasing learning efficiency and security.
An automatic time and attendance system can be employed to solve employee management tasks like clock in and clock out records, early and extra hours records.
- Biometric Access Control
-
With the increasing computational power of mobile devices deploying on-device facial lock systems is now possible. In spite of the availability of other biometric lock systems available facial recognition is much more preferred because of easy deployment and quick locking and unlocking.
Covid-19 has given a radical boost to digital banking. Even before the pandemic users were engaged in digital banking services but now banking systems have observed a considerable increase in users moving to online banking solutions because of which deploying better customer monitoring and biometric security system is one of the prime needs.
- Emotion Recognition
-
Because of the ability to recognize multiple users in a single frame, emotion monitoring in movie theaters and stadiums is becoming common to analyze crowd sentiment and also get more statistically backed reviews.
Emotion recognition is also being used by hotels and restaurants to get more analytical results for their services.
How could it be a Privacy Threat?
Even if Facial Recognition technology has shown numerous real-life applications and improvements to existing systems still it has been criticized for the legality and ethics of its use.
While nobody can take away your physical face, digital images are another story. You can give up your right to ownership to your face when you sign a term of service agreement on a social network. Signing away the rights to your likeness allows images of you to be collected as data and sold.
For public safety and security purposes, facial recognition has a lot of potential to control crime and criminal activities but without proper regulation and oversight, there is potential of it being misused. This solely depends on the regulations and the authority which is using the system.
Face Recognition in India
- The Aadhaar project has one of the world’s largest biometric databases, containing unique digital identity numbers, names, ages, addresses, mobile numbers, and also face images of reportedly 1.29 billion residents as of the end of March 2021. UIDAI announced that the facial authentication system would be launched in a phased manner. It’s presently being tested for financial services. Face authentication will be available as an add-on service infusion mode and one more authentication factor like a fingerprint, Iris, or TOTP. (source)
- India is also expecting to roll out the World’s most extensive facial recognition system, National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) had issued an RFP inviting bids to develop a nationwide facial recognition system According to the 160-page document, the system will be a centralized web application hosted at the NCRB Data Center in Delhi. It will be available for access to all the police stations. (source)
- A passenger stands as she registers her personal details at a facial recognition counter at the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, on July 26, 2019. (source)
- In March 2020, Government officials admitted that the law enforcement agencies used facial recognition software to identify about 1,100 people who participated in February 2020 riots in the capital New Delhi. (source)
- Recently the Indian Railway has deployed nearly 500 facial recognition cameras to track millions of passengers in an effort to increase surveillance efficiency. The system was employed in around 30 stations in Gujarat and Maharashtra including Mumbai which is famous for its local train network with 7 million daily commuters. (source)
- The Times of India reported a notable result during the trial run of the Facial Recognition System (FRS) by Delhi Police who were able to identify nearly 3,000 missing children in just 4 days. (source)
Role of FaceLabs Helping businesses to grow
FaceLab provides AI-driven computer vision solutions to improve the customer experience while enhancing safety. Our recognition technology is built into industry-leading touchless access control and automated watchlist alerting capabilities that perform with unrivaled accuracy, speed, and efficiency in the most challenging conditions.
FaceLab has developed a suite of SDK and a dockerized container solution that harnesses the powers of machine learning and artificial intelligence to transform your existing camera infrastructure into actionable intelligence. Facial recognition, weapon detection, and age verification technologies are all easily deployable on your infrastructure, creating safer and smarter environments for your customers, employees, guests, and more.
At FaceLabs our Computer Vision Scientists from FreeFlow Tech is vigilant to your privacy, our facial recognition implementation neither stores real facial images nor any type of potential private face data which could be misused anywhere else. We employ industry-standard encryption algorithms to store sensitive information in our servers which are further backed with strict access control policies and Automated incident response and recovery to help shift the primary focus of security teams from response to analyzing the root cause.
AI and Facial Recognition Technologies are only growing and they can be powerful and helpful tools when used correctly, FaceLabs has a dedicated team capable of using these technologies to help businesses to grow exponentially.
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