Facial recognition is the second most popular and widespread biometric technology. It is usually used to supplement other biometric identification techniques (such as fingerprint biometrics) and other identification/verification methods (expert evaluation, visual control by immigration or customs staff, etc.)
Facial Biometrics Features
Facial biometrics is mostly advantageous for its contactless scanning procedure when obtaining data required to identify/verify humans, and a wide variety of source information (photos, video, and surveillance data). A major drawback is that the number of identifiers is too few, compared to fingerprints: 1 face vs. 10 fingerprints.
Processing Face Images
During identification, a facial recognition system automatically singles out and processes data that characterize the most distinctive facial features: nose, lips, eyebrows contours or distances between these features. These data are used to generate digital biometric templates that are subsequently used for matching.
Facial recognition techniques are especially vulnerable to external factors, such as lighting, angle of the head bend, and appearance changes, such as glasses, beard, make-up, etc. This drawback leads to the lowest accuracy and the highest number of false matches (especially compared to similar figures with the other popular biometric techniques – fingerprint biometrics and iris recognition).
Still, facial recognition technology is quite effective in comparing photos, provided, that such photos are of high quality and humans shown on them have not intentionally altered their appearance.
Developers of biometrically-enabled solutions based on facial recognition technology use their best efforts to improve their products by adding more functionality.
BioLink solutions based on facial biometrics are:
- BioLink AMIS, an automated multi-biometric information system.