Identity, Security, Payments, Biometrics, Smart Cards and Authentication News

UK researchers claim 100% accuracy in facial recognition

Monday, January 28, 2008

Mike Burton, professor of psychology at Glasgow University, and lecturer Rob Jenkins claim to have achieved 100% accuracy with facial recognition technology.

Lighting, angle of the photo and other factors typically interfere with getting an accurate facial match. Burton and Jenkins got around this by taking 20 different photos and producing an average photo.

“We modeled human familiarity by using image averaging to derive stable face representations from naturally varying photographs,” the two say in a paper published in the January issue of Science. “This simple procedure increased the accuracy of an industry standard face-recognition algorithm from 54% to 100%, bringing the robust performance of a familiar human to an automated system.”

Law enforcement and government officials have tried to use facial recognition biometrics to identify individuals in a crowd, but it hasn’t been very successful.

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Beta testers for Sensible Vision’s new FastAccess Anywhere facial recognition password replacement app are praising its speed, accuracy and reliability.

FastAccess Anywhere is available on both iOS and Android and replaces traditional passwords with a secure combination of the user’s face and a gesture. This enables the user to replace login password information and quickly log in to devices, applications and Web sites. Users can also synchronize the app settings between devices.

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The National Institute of Standards and Technology released a report detailing the evaluation of iris recognition software from 11 different organizations, finding that this method of identification is getting easier and faster, albeit with less accurate results.

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Nevada-based multimodal biometric authentication provider BioID has announced that its webcam-based biometric recognition product can now be used for authentication to Intel’s Cloud SSO and McAfee’s Cloud Identity Manager products.

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FingerTec USA has expanded its line of fingerprint time clock software systems with the Face ID 3, which utilizes facial recognition capability.

Face ID 3 is a contact-free computer timeclock that can be used in business or home environments. The system weighs about four pounds and uses facial recognition plus a network of infrared scanners for a surface texture analysis (STA) algorithm.

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Medical researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) who are trying to develop a mobile app that can identify medication have received a T1 Catalyst Mobile Health Translational Project Award from the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at UCSF.

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Three University of California, Riverside scholars have received a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to launch a program that will use facial recognition software to identify unknown subjects in portrait art.

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