Facial recognition system - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

A facial recognition system is a computer application

Application software

Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...

for automatically identifying

Identification

Identification or Identify may refer to:* Body identification* Combat Identification* Eyewitness identification* Forensic identification* Gender identity* Hazard Identification...

or verifying

Verification

The word verification may refer to:* Verification and validation, in engineering or quality management systems, it is the act of reviewing, inspecting or testing, in order to establish and document that a product, service or system meets regulatory or technical standards.* Verification , in the...

a person

Person

A person is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes strongly associated with being human , for example in a particular moral or legal context...

from a digital image

Digital image

A digital image is a numeric representation of a two-dimensional image. Depending on whether or not the image resolution is fixed, it may be of vector or raster type...

or a video frame

Film frame

In filmmaking, video production, animation, and related fields, a film frame or video frame is one of the many still images which compose the complete moving picture...

from a video

Video

Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...

source. One of the ways to do this is by comparing selected facial feature

Face

The face is a central sense organ complex, for those animals that have one, normally on the ventral surface of the head, and can, depending on the definition in the human case, include the hair, forehead, eyebrow, eyelashes, eyes, nose, ears, cheeks, mouth, lips, philtrum, temple, teeth, skin, and...

s from the image and a facial database

Database management system

A database management system is a software package with computer programs that control the creation, maintenance, and use of a database. It allows organizations to conveniently develop databases for various applications by database administrators and other specialists. A database is an integrated...

.

It is typically used in security system

Burglar alarm

Burglar , alarms are systems designed to detect unauthorized entry into a building or area. They consist of an array of sensors, a control panel and alerting system, and interconnections...

s and can be compared to other biometrics

Biometrics

Biometrics As Jain & Ross point out, "the term biometric authentication is perhaps more appropriate than biometrics since the latter has been historically used in the field of statistics to refer to the analysis of biological data [36]" . consists of methods...

such as fingerprint

Fingerprint

A fingerprint in its narrow sense is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. In a wider use of the term, fingerprints are the traces of an impression from the friction ridges of any part of a human hand. A print from the foot can also leave an impression of friction ridges...

or eye iris recognition systems.

Traditional

Some facial recognition algorithms identify faces by extracting landmarks, or features, from an image of the subject's face. For example, an algorithm may analyze the relative position, size, and/or shape of the eyes, nose, cheekbones, and jaw. These features are then used to search for other images with matching features.
Other algorithms normalize a gallery of face images and then compress the face data, only saving the data in the image that is useful for face detection. A probe image is then compared with the face data. One of the earliest successful systems is based on template matching techniques applied to a set of salient facial features, providing a sort of compressed face representation.

Recognition algorithms can be divided into two main approaches, geometric, which looks at distinguishing features, or photometric, which is a statistical approach that distill an image into values and comparing the values with templates to eliminate variances.

Popular recognition algorithms include Principal Component Analysis using eigenface

Eigenface

Eigenfaces are a set of eigenvectors used in the computer vision problem of human face recognition. The approach of using eigenfaces for recognition was developed by Sirovich and Kirby and used by Matthew Turk and Alex Pentland in face classification. It is considered the first successful example...

s, Linear Discriminate Analysis

Linear discriminant analysis

Linear discriminant analysis and the related Fisher's linear discriminant are methods used in statistics, pattern recognition and machine learning to find a linear combination of features which characterizes or separates two or more classes of objects or events...

, Elastic Bunch Graph Matching using the Fisherface algorithm, the Hidden Markov model

Hidden Markov model

A hidden Markov model is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process with unobserved states. An HMM can be considered as the simplest dynamic Bayesian network. The mathematics behind the HMM was developed by L. E...

, and the neuronal motivated dynamic link matching

Dynamic Link Matching

Dynamic link matching is a neuronal model for face recognition. It uses wavelet transformations to encode incoming image data.Bunch graph matching is an algorithm based on many ideas found in dynamic link matching-External links:*...

3 Dimensional recognition

A newly emerging trend, claimed to achieve improved accuracies, is three-dimensional face recognition

Three-dimensional face recognition

Three-dimensional face recognition is a modality of facial recognition methods in which the three-dimensional geometry of the human face is used...

. This technique uses 3D sensors to capture information about the shape of a face. This information is then used to identify distinctive features on the surface of a face, such as the contour of the eye sockets, nose, and chin.

One advantage of 3D facial recognition is that it is not affected by changes in lighting like other techniques. It can also identify a face from a range of viewing angles, including a profile view. Three-dimensional data points from a face vastly improve the precision of facial recognition. 3D research is enhanced by the development of sophisticated sensors that do a better job of capturing 3D face imagery. The sensors work by projecting structured light onto the face. Up to a dozen or more of these image sensors can be placed on the same CMOS chip -- each sensor captures a different part of the spectrum.

Even a perfect 3D matching technique could be sensitive to expressions.
For that goal a group at the Technion applied tools from metric geometry
to treat expressions as isometries A company called Vision Access created a firm solution for 3D facial recognition. The company was later acquired by the biometric access company Bioscrypt Inc.

Bioscrypt Inc.

Bioscrypt Inc. is a biometrics research, development and manufacturing company. It provides fingerprint IP readers for physical access control systems, Facial recognition system readers for contactless access control authentication and OEM fingerprint modules for embedded applications.Bioscrypt is...

which developed a version known as 3D FastPass.

Skin texture analysis

Another emerging trend uses the visual details of the skin, as captured in standard digital or scanned images. This technique, called skin texture analysis, turns the unique lines, patterns, and spots apparent in a person’s skin into a mathematical space.

Tests have shown that with the addition of skin texture analysis, performance in recognizing faces can increase 20 to 25 percent.

Software

Google's Picasa
Picasa
Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my...

digital image organizer has a built in face recognition system starting from version 3.5 onwards. It can associate faces with persons, so that queries can be run on pictures to return all pictures with a specific group of people together. Picasaweb.com has also been providing a similar feature to its users.
Apple iPhoto
IPhoto
iPhoto is a digital photograph manipulation software application developed by Apple Inc. and released with every Macintosh personal computer as part of the iLife suite of digital life management applications...

, photo organizer distributed with iLife
ILife
iLife is a suite of software applications developed by Apple for organizing, editing, and publishing photos, movies, and music. The suite comprises five applications: iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb, all of which run on the Mac OS X operating system....

suite of applications includes a system by which people can tag recognized people on photos. Then they can be searched using Spotlight
Spotlight (software)
Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates a virtual index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer,...

.
Sony's Picture Motion Browser
Picture Motion Browser
Picture Motion Browser is a software application from Sony for organizing and editing digital photos.-Organization and editing:...

(PMB) analyses photo, associates photos with identical faces so that they can be tagged accordingly, and differentiates between photos with one person, many persons and nobody.
Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

also included face recognition technology
Windows Live
Windows Live
Windows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft, part of their software plus services platform. A majority of these services are Web applications, accessible from a browser, but there are also client-side binary applications that require...

Photo Gallery also included face recognition in last version.

Notable users and deployments

The London Borough of Newham

London Borough of Newham

The London Borough of Newham is a London borough formed from the towns of West Ham and East Ham, within East London.It is situated east of the City of London, and is north of the River Thames. According to 2006 estimates, Newham has one of the highest ethnic minority populations of all the...

, in the UK

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, previously trialled a facial recognition system built into their borough-wide CCTV

Closed-circuit television

Closed-circuit television is the use of video cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place, on a limited set of monitors....

system.

The German Federal Police

German Federal Police

The Bundespolizei is a uniformed federal police force in Germany. It is subordinate to the Federal Ministry of the Interior...

use a facial recognition system to allow voluntary subscribers to pass fully automated border controls at Frankfurt

Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...

Rhein-Main international airport. Subscribers need to be European Union

European Union

The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...

or Swiss

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

citizens. Since 2005 the German Federal Criminal Police Office

Federal Criminal Police Office (Germany)

The Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany is a national investigative police agency in Germany and falls directly under the Federal Ministry of the Interior...

offers centralized facial recognition on mugshot images for all German police agencies.
Recognition systems are also used by casino

Casino

In modern English, a casino is a facility which houses and accommodates certain types of gambling activities. Casinos are most commonly built near or combined with hotels, restaurants, retail shopping, cruise ships or other tourist attractions...

s to catch card counter

Card counting

Card counting is a casino card game strategy used primarily in the blackjack family of casino games to determine whether the next hand is likely to give a probable advantage to the player or to the dealer. Card counters, also known as advantage players, attempt to decrease the inherent casino house...

s and other blacklist

Blacklist

A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize a person from a certain social circle...

ed individuals.

The Australian Customs Service

Australian Customs Service

The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service is the Australian Federal Government agency responsible for managing the security and integrity of the Australian border, facilitating the movement of legitimate international travellers and goods, and collecting border-related duties and...

has an automated border processing system called SmartGate

Smartgate

SmartGate is an automated border processing system being introduced by the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service and New Zealand Customs Service. It is a secure and simple system that performs the customs and immigration checks normally made by a Customs Officer when a traveller arrives...

that uses facial recognition. The system compares the face of the individual with the image in the e-passport

Biometric passport

A biometric passport, also known as an e-passport or ePassport, is a combined paper and electronic passport that contains biometric information that can be used to authenticate the identity of travelers...

microchip, certifying that the holder of the passport

Passport

A passport is a document, issued by a national government, which certifies, for the purpose of international travel, the identity and nationality of its holder. The elements of identity are name, date of birth, sex, and place of birth....

is the rightful owner.

Pennsylvania Justice Network searches crime scene photographs and CCTV footage in the mugshot database of previous arrests. A number of cold cases have been resolved since the system became operational in 2005. Other law enforcement agencies in the USA and abroad use arrest mugshot databases in their forensic investigative work.

U.S. Department of State operates one of the largest face recognition systems in the world with over 75 million photographs that is actively used for visa

Visa (document)

A visa is a document showing that a person is authorized to enter the territory for which it was issued, subject to permission of an immigration official at the time of actual entry. The authorization may be a document, but more commonly it is a stamp endorsed in the applicant's passport...

processing.

Spaceship Earth in Epcot

Epcot

Epcot is a theme park in the Walt Disney World Resort, located near Orlando, Florida. The park is dedicated to the celebration of human achievement, namely international culture and technological innovation. The second park built at the resort, it opened on October 1, 1982 and was initially named...

uses a facial recognition system to place the riders' faces on animated characters.

Additional uses

In addition to being used for security systems, authorities have found a number of other applications for facial recognition systems. While earlier post 9/11 deployments were well publicized trials, more recent deployments are rarely written about due to their covert nature.

At Super Bowl XXXV

Super Bowl XXXV

Super Bowl XXXV was played on January 28, 2001 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida to decide the National Football League champion following the 2000 regular season. The American Football Conference champion Baltimore Ravens defeated the National Football Conference champion New York...

in January 2001, police in Tampa Bay, Florida used Viisage facial recognition software to search for potential criminals and terrorists in attendance at the event. 19 people with minor criminal records were potentially identified.

In the 2000 presidential election, the Mexican government employed facial recognition software to prevent voter fraud. Some individuals had been registering to vote under several different names, in an attempt to place multiple votes. By comparing new facial images to those already in the voter database, authorities were able to reduce duplicate registrations. Similar technologies are being used in the United States to prevent people from obtaining fake identification cards and driver’s licenses.

There are also a number of potential uses for facial recognition that are currently being developed. For example, the technology could be used as a security measure at ATM’s; instead of using a bank card or personal identification number, the ATM would capture an image of your face, and compare it to your photo in the bank database to confirm your identity. This same concept could also be applied to computers; by using a webcam to capture a digital image of yourself, your face could replace your password as a means to log-in.

Also, in addition to biometric usages, modern digital cameras often incorporate a facial detection

Face detection

Face detection is a computer technology that determines the locations and sizes of human faces in arbitrary images. It detects facial features and ignores anything else, such as buildings, trees and bodies....

system that allows the camera to focus and measure exposure on the face of the subject, thus guaranteeing a focused portrait of the person being photographed. Some cameras, in addition, incorporate a smile shutter, or take automatically a second picture if someone closed their eyes during exposure.

Because of certain limitations of fingerprint recognition systems, nowadays facial recognition systems are finding market penetration as Attendance monitoring alternatives.

Embedded Face Recognition Systems

With the recent days advancement in Embedded technology, many embedded Facial recognition products are available which though have limitation of number of users it can handle (because of memory limitation) gives performance almost similar to desktop counterparts.

Comparative study

Among the different biometric techniques, facial recognition may not be the most reliable and efficient. However, one key advantage is that it does not require aid (or consent) from the test subject. Properly designed systems installed in airports, multiplexes, and other public places can identify individuals among the crowd. Other biometrics like fingerprints, iris scans, and speech recognition cannot perform this kind of mass identification. However, questions have been raised on the effectiveness of facial recognition software in cases of railway and airport security.

Weaknesses

Face recognition is not perfect and struggles to perform under certain conditions. Ralph Gross, a researcher at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, describes one obstacle related to the viewing angle of the face: "Face recognition has been getting pretty good at full frontal faces and 20 degrees off, but as soon as you go towards profile, there've been problems."

Other conditions where face recognition does not work well include poor lighting, sunglasses, long hair, or other objects partially covering the subject’s face, and low resolution images.

Another serious disadvantage is that many systems are less effective if facial expressions vary. Even a big smile can render the system less effective. For instance: Canada now allows only neutral facial expressions in passport photos.

Effectiveness

Critics of the technology complain that the London Borough of Newham

London Borough of Newham

scheme has, , never recognized a single criminal, despite several criminals in the system's database living in the Borough and the system having been running for several years. "Not once, as far as the police know, has Newham's automatic facial recognition system spotted a live target." This information seems to conflict with claims that the system was credited with a 34% reduction in crime (hence why it was rolled out to Birmingham also). However it can be explained by the notion that when the public is regularly told that they are under constant video surveillance with advanced face recognition technology, this fear alone can reduce the crime rate, whether the face recognition system technically works or does not. This has been the basis for several other face recognition based security systems, where the technology itself does not work particularly well but the user's perception of the technology does.

An experiment by the local police

Police

The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...

department in Tampa

Tampa, Florida

Tampa is a city in the U.S. state of Florida. It serves as the county seat for Hillsborough County. Tampa is located on the west coast of Florida. The population of Tampa in 2010 was 335,709....

, Florida

Florida

Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

, had similarly disappointing results.

A system at Boston's Logan Airport

Logan International Airport

General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport is located in the East Boston neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts . It covers , has six runways, and employs an estimated 16,000 people. It is the 19th busiest airport in the United States.Boston serves as a focus city for JetBlue Airways...

was shut down after failing to make any matches during a two-year test period.

Privacy concerns

Many citizens express concern that their privacy

Privacy

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...

is being compromised by the use of surveillance technologies by corporations and the state. Some fear that it could lead to a “total surveillance society,” with the government and other authorities having the ability to know the whereabouts and activities of all citizens around the clock. This knowledge has, is and could continue to be deployed to prevent the lawful exercise of rights of citizens to criticize those in office, specific government policies or corporate practices. Many centralized power structures with such surveillance capabilities have abused their privileged access to maintain control of the political and economic apparatus and curtail populist reforms.

Recent Improvements

In 2006, the performance of the latest face recognition algorithms were evaluated in the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC)

Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC)

right | center |250pxThe Face Recognition Grand Challenge was conducted in an effort to promote and advance face recognition technology.-Overview:...

. High-resolution face images, 3-D face scans, and iris images were used in the tests. The results indicated that the new algorithms are 10 times more accurate than the face recognition algorithms of 2002 and 100 times more accurate than those of 1995. Some of the algorithms were able to outperform human participants in recognizing faces and could uniquely identify identical twins.

U.S. Government-sponsored evaluations and challenge problems have helped spur over two orders-of-magnitude improvement in face-recognition system performance. Since 1993, the error rate of automatic face-recognition systems has decreased by a factor of 272. The reduction applies to systems that match people with face images captured in studio or mugshot environments. In Moore's law terms, the error rate decreased by one-half every two years.

Low-resolution images of faces can be enhanced using face hallucination

Face hallucination

Face hallucination is super-resolution of face images, or clarifying the details of a face from a low-resolution image. The technique of sparse coding can be used. Because of the importance of face images in facial recognition systems and other applications, face hallucination has become an area of...

. Further improvements in high resolution, megapixel cameras in the last few years have helped to resolve the issue of insufficient resolution.

Early development

Pioneers of Automated Facial Recognition include: Woody Bledsoe

Woody Bledsoe

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Bledsoe was a mathematician, computer scientist, and prominent educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and automated theorem proving...

, Helen Chan Wolf, and Charles Bisson.

During 1964 and 1965, Bledsoe, along with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson, worked on using the computer to recognize human faces (Bledsoe 1966a, 1966b; Bledsoe and Chan 1965). He was proud of this work, but because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency that did not allow much publicity, little of the work was published. Given a large database of images (in effect, a book of mug shots) and a photograph, the problem was to select from the database a small set of records such that one of the image records matched the photograph. The success of the method could be measured in terms of the ratio of the answer list to the number of records in the database. Bledsoe (1966a) described the following difficulties:
This project was labeled man-machine because the human extracted the coordinates of a set of features from the photographs, which were then used by the computer for recognition. Using a graphics tablet

Graphics tablet

A graphics tablet is a computer input device that enables a user to hand-draw images and graphics, similar to the way a person draws images with a pencil and paper. These tablets may also be used to capture data or handwritten signatures...

(GRAFACON or RAND TABLET), the operator would extract the coordinates of features such as the center of pupils, the inside corner of eyes, the outside corner of eyes, point of widows peak, and so on. From these coordinates, a list of 20 distances, such as width of mouth and width of eyes, pupil to pupil, were computed. These operators could process about 40 pictures an hour. When building the database, the name of the person in the photograph was associated with the list of computed distances and stored in the computer. In the recognition phase, the set of distances was compared with the corresponding distance for each photograph, yielding a distance between the photograph and the database record. The closest records are returned.

This brief description is an oversimplification that fails in general because it is unlikely that any two pictures would match in head rotation, lean, tilt, and scale (distance from the camera). Thus, each set of distances is normalized to represent the face in a frontal orientation. To accomplish this normalization, the program first tries to determine the tilt, the lean, and the rotation. Then, using these angles, the computer undoes the effect of these transformations on the computed distances. To compute these angles, the computer must know the three-dimensional geometry of the head. Because the actual heads were unavailable, Bledsoe (1964) used a standard head derived from measurements on seven heads.

After Bledsoe left PRI in 1966, this work was continued at the Stanford Research Institute, primarily by Peter Hart

Peter E. Hart

Peter E. Hart is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He was chairman and president of Ricoh Innovations, which he founded in 1997...

. In experiments performed on a database of over 2000 photographs, the computer consistently outperformed humans when presented with the same recognition tasks (Bledsoe 1968). Peter Hart (1996) enthusiastically recalled the project with the exclamation, "It really worked!"

By about 1997, the system developed by Christoph von der Malsburg and graduate students of the University of Bochum in Germany and the University of Southern California

University of Southern California

The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

in the United States outperformed most systems with those of Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

and the University of Maryland

University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...

rated next. The Bochum system was developed through funding by the United States Army Research Laboratory. The software was sold as ZN-Face and used by customers such as Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank AG is a global financial service company with its headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. It employs more than 100,000 people in over 70 countries, and has a large presence in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific and the emerging markets...

and operators of airport

Airport

An airport is a location where aircraft such as fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and blimps take off and land. Aircraft may be stored or maintained at an airport...

s and other busy locations. The software was "robust enough to make identifications from less-than-perfect face views. It can also often see through such impediments to identification as mustaches, beards, changed hair styles and glasses—even sunglasses".

In about January 2007, image searches were "based on the text surrounding a photo," for example, if text nearby mentions the image content. Polar Rose technology can guess from a photograph, in about 1.5 seconds, what any individual may look like in three dimensions, and thought they "will ask users to input the names of people they recognize in photos online" to help build a database. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1005/1005.4263.pdf

External links

Face Recognition Homepage
Face Recognition Research Community
Introduction from How Stuff Works
The UK Minority Report: Has 'Precrime' Finally Arrived? By Patrick St James, April 2, 2009, OpEdNews
Face Recognition: A Literature Survey by Sigurdur Ingvarsson By Carl A. K. Borrebaeck, R. Chellappa, Leejay Wu, and Christos Faloutsos
Christos Faloutsos
Dr. Christos Faloutsos is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has received the Presidential Young Investigator Award by the National Science Foundation , seven best paper awards, and several teaching awards. He has served as a member of the executive committee of SIGKDD...
FBI Using DMV Photos to Search for Fugitives
Facial Identification Scientific Working Group

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.