Research in recent face recognition technologies seem to suggest that it is challenging to fake the identity of the person even after a facial surgery (though, we find that hard to believe) because they make use of something called as ‘nodes’ (around 600 nodes for every face) of the facial structure, which these techniques claim, remains unique to each person – dead or alive.

Face recognition has its distinct advantage of being non-contact in nature compared to the other well-known bio metrics. A distant webcam/ video recorder and off lately smart phones, are capturing details required for bio metric systems that use Face Recognition, without any extra effort required by the people whose biometrics are being captured. Coming to think of it, this is in itself is a revolution in terms of the technological advancements that have taken place to enable such a seamless biometric operation to take place.

We have seen that face recognition technology backed products are becoming part of the mainstream. Here are a few use cases of face recognition technology being used to impact societies across different geographies:

New York & New Jersey, USA: New York and New Jersey are the first states using facial recognition software to bust illegal drivers at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). CBS 2’s Jessica Schneider says it’s the key technological tool now used by law enforcement. It has already helped authorities make 3,500 arrests of the illegal or dual motor license fraudsters. Bangalore, India: LabourNet Services has adopted SmartAttendance, “a mobile based face recognition solution” to make sure the expected beneficiaries are receiving educational and skill development services at right time and place. As a social enterprise they are able to Control the drop out rates of the enrolled trainees

Ensure the presence of expected trainees at the training sessions

Automate the complete monitoring process Arizona,USA: The number of potential ID fraud cases identified has increased by 860 percent, as reported by the Arizona Republic. The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) has implemented a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) vendor-hosted facial recognition solution, to support the Motor Vehicle Division (MVD) credential-issuance process. This will further enhance fraud and identity theft protection for the citizens of Arizona and over time, expedite the processing and cut the number of fraud investigation cases. The system cross-references new driver’s license pictures with the MVD’s database of existing drivers. USA: Apple and Facebook have already worked on a mechanism that auto shares the images their social circles based on face recognition Indonesia, US, Portugal, Africa, India : Using face recognition to identify faces of church visitors from CCTV footage or photos to match churchgoers used to check attendance numbers, and alert church officials if some members stop coming to services. Attendance of these events and services is a key indicator on how the church performs in terms of popularity and growth. It also allows the church to keep a close connection to its members. Most churches already keep track of members attendance manually. However, when it comes to big events it is nearly an impossible task to track members. It can also screen for people banned from the church. USA: Customs and Border Protection Officers stationed at air ports of entry are using facial recognition technology as a tool to help them in determining whether an individual presenting themselves with a valid U.S. electronic passport is the same individual photographed in that passport. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is conducting 1:1 Facial Recognition to identify this. China: A team of university and technology company researchers in China introduced an ATM with built-in facial recognition technology to cut the risk of illegal withdrawals. The new ATM, built by a team from Tsinghua University and Tzekwan Technology, which captured the facial images using the cameras equipped in the ATM and later compare them with ID photos for verification. The facial recognition measure will be an added layer of identification on top of the traditional password or PIN required to access funds with a card. The ATM will also be linked to banks and local police offices to further bolster security. India: A social enterprise delivering health services in remote places (rural and semi rural areas) has adopted a novel solution to make sure beneficiaries receive the services at the right place and time through the on-the-field employees. The SmartAttendance, a mobile based face recognition and tracking solution collects bio metric data tagged with GPS and time stamp to detect and identify beneficiaries at meeting venues. This has enabled the organization to track, monitor and audit the data coming from all the on-site service locations across the country. Salary calculations, productivity analysis and auditing are made extremely simple through the use of visual dashboards. Europe: Government and law enforcement agencies took a huge technological leap by providing their agents with the ability to identify individuals using facial recognition in ‘near’ real-time. Agents can now transmit photos or videos captured on their smartphone through specific mobile application,which later gets processed by the application provider on the cloud server using automated face detection and recognition technologies. Thailand: Using the face recognition ability to identify people from group images, Thailand Government is investigating a deadly bombing case on a famous shrine. Such automatic machines can detect up to 100 people within 5-6 seconds than making people sit and do the same job which would take all day.

While this is a small roundup of the Use-Cases where we see Face Recognition technology in use, we would love to hear from you if there have been some glaring omissions.