Facial Recognition: The Era of Personalization

Facial recognition is technology based on the usage of artificial intelligence to recognize human faces. Artificial Intelligence is one of the most talked-about buzz in the market these days. The technology has created its space in many use cases, especially in the area of security & surveillance and crime prevention.

Today’s law enforcement agencies must maintain high awareness over large areas through a potentially overwhelming number of security cameras. It’s seemingly impossible to have eyes on every camera every minute, and it’s easy to lose focus when priority one is keeping people, facilities, and assets secure.

With facial recognition technology, the work of such agencies become more effective. They already have a large data base of faces of the criminals, terrorists, etc. as suspects, which can be used effectively with facial recognition technology to generate real-time alerts on the sighting of such suspects in from of the CCTV cameras in preexisting in the network.

The technology behind is creating a facial signature of the captured face and sending it back to the servers to match with existing faces. The accuracy for such detection has reached over 99.9% and the new algorithms have also improved with biases means the improved technology doesn’t differentiate between race, skin color, etc.

China is the largest user of Face recognition for a large number of use cases like general surveillance, crime prevention, access control, payment by face, etc. In India, the technology has already crossed its trial phase especially with some of the state police, Indian Railways.

The marketing getting matured with time and newer use cases being discovered. A large number of international and local AI companies are enhancing their products to bring better user experience. In the recent International Book Fair in Kolkata, West Bengal Police used a few cameras with Facial Recognition technology to detect pickpockets and mobile snatchers. They could track four such criminals during the event with the help of the facial recognition software and intercepted them in real-time.

Delhi Police used such technology during important events like Independence Day Celebration to track terrorists or during riots to identify rioters. Similar use cases are being tried by police forces in Gujarat, Karnataka, UP, TN, Kerala, etc.

The smart city projects are also including this technology for similar use cases. One of the most talked-about tenders these days are floated by NCRB, wherein they aim to connect police stations across the country and connect Facial Recognition Technology for better policing and sharing of criminal databases.

Indian Railways are one the first users to try this technology and they are aiming to use the technology for crime prevention, identify and find missing persons, especially children at the stations and inside running trains. Many such projects are underway to make the train journey safe and secure.

Many other potential use cases will expand using facial recognition technology in the coming years, viz…

Law Enforcement & Security – The technology will be expanded to more CCTV cameras and a larger database. Face recognition also detects gender, approximate age & sentiments, which can be used for criminal analysis and patterns. With improving algorithms, the forensic use of technology is also not ruled out. The face plus body detection, body paint detection, face detection with sketch will make the results more accurate.

Healthcare – One of the best use cases is tracking the movement of patients bearing contagious disease. The access control, visitor management and at higher level, detection of certain types of disease based on facial pattern, eye zone coloration, skin tone, etc. will be tried in the near future.

Retail – Facial recognition technology can personalize your shopping experience. Through facial recognition technology, retail companies can capture the facial expressions of the consumers and optimize their products according to the amount of interest shown or not shown for the products. This is a huge opportunity for retail companies to capitalize on.

Hospitality – Facial recognition can prove to be beneficial in providing better customer service. Connecting this technology to a guest’s account will allow the employees to provide better and more personalized service. Facial recognition can be used by the guests to check-in and to enter their room. This technology is already being used by Marriott hotels in China.

Elections – Recently in Telangana, the Facial Recognition application was used for identifying the voters in corporation elections. Both Voters and electoral officers were very happy to use technology. Larger usage in general elections speedup election process and voting time at the same time will reduce the chances of voter fraud, complicated voter registration and other factors that hamper the voting process.

With any new technology, there is apprehensions about the data security breach and misuse. Facial Recognition (FR) and AI as a whole is also being viewed with skepticism. Such a section of people should realize that FR technology is making CTV intelligent and the only digital signature of the face is stored of the subjects.

Our data with social media platform is wider and have potential to be misused, than our encrypted face signatures in FR. With secure data policy and government regulation, the concern of data breach can be ruled out to a large extent.

According to one of the studies, the facial recognition market is expected to grow by $7.7 billion in 2022 from $4 billion in 2017. There are many more use cases being developed by a large number of startup communities and established companies alike and times are exciting for this technology.

Bikas Jha, Country Head, RealNetworks India Pvt. Ltd.