Every day we come across new technology revolutions. These innovations are readily impacting our daily lives and especially business operations. Gone are the days when we used to witness technology in science-fiction movies and novels. Now the technology is laying strong foundations in the real-world. Facial recognition technology is one of the phenomena of modern technology.
What is Facial Recognition Technology
Facial recognition technology is an advanced Biometric Technology used to recognized and match human faces. The concept of face recognition has been there for ages but now it is not limited to just unlocking mobile phones. Facial recognition technology is based on two main principles.
Identification – to ensure the presence of a human face
Authentication – to ensure the identity of authorized human and verify that people are who they say they are.
How does Facial Recognition Work?
Face Recognition technology is developed using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithm to efficiently fetch and match the person’s face. Though the common function of this technology is to recognize, the facial recognition system works in three basic steps.
Face Detection: The essential process to detect human faces in images or videos.
I-D Capture: the detected face is 2D or 3D captured by the systems and it converts the face of a person into digital information (machine-readable data) by applying various AI algorithms.
Face Matching: This process matches the features (for example, face length, the distance between the eyes, bridge of the nose, the contour of the chin, lips, etc.) of the captured image with that of already stored data to find the right match.
New transformations in the Technology
Facial Recognition technology was originally developed to identify and verify the human beings. But as technology is advancing, face recognition is also transforming. It has become an effective parameter of security.
The businesses are actively utilizing face verification services to verify and authenticate the identity of their users. Not only this but with the advanced AI algorithms, the facial verification technology is now used to read human emotions.
Amazon’s Rekognition technology is an example of this transformation. According to them their system can now analyze the facial expressions of humans and detect emotions like happiness, sad, angry, excited, etc.
Another major transformation in this technology is the prevention against spoofing attacks. Based on innovative machine learning algorithms, it combats the spoofing attacks by ensuring the liveness detection of a person.
The face verification solution is a complete defense against any type of fraud. With 3D depth algorithms, the facial recognition technology can easily identify print attacks, video replay attacks, warped photo attacks, and 3D masks attacks.
Applications and Use Cases
Facial recognition technology is actively adopted by organizations and businesses to secure their customer base, prevent frauds and provide enhanced customer experience. Some of the applications and use cases of Facial recognition technology are as follows:
Marketing and Retail:
The marketing and retailing industry are actively using this technology to provide its customers with exceptional convenience and experience. Just like in online retailing stores and social media platforms the users are shown the personalized recommendations, some physical retailing stores are also using Biometric Authentication systems to analyze customers’ behaviors and expressions and improve the customer purchase process.
Examples of such cases are the American department store “Saks Fifth Avenue” and “Amazon Go”
Security and Fraud Prevention:
The increasing trend of digital fraud has involved regulatory agencies who have enforced the businesses and organizations to carry out the KYC process. Face verification is an essential step for the KYC process since no one can steal the biometric data of a person.
Hence, it makes this technology the most secure one to fight against, identity fraud, account takeover, data breaches, and false chargebacks.