Far from being a technology only seen in a sci-fi movie, Facial Recognition technology is already influencing the day to day life and businesses. It has already changed the way we deal with customers, create new connections and also predict the future.
The Future is Now
One of the Top 7 Technologies to Watch this Year, according to CES – the global stage for innovation attracting world’s business leaders and innovators – is Artificial Intelligence:
“From big data analytics to speech recognition to predictive technology,
artificial intelligence is changing how we do business.”
Source: CES about Artificial Intelligence
Far from being a technology only seen in a sci-fi movie, it is already influencing the day to day life and business. It has already changed the way we learn, compute and process things, create new connections and also predict the future.
The most desired application is the smart home and building sector, especially because it learns and reproduces the users’ preferences and behavioural preferences and applies to its automation.
While this is the most desired, the autonomous driving and its possibilities in the future of the mobility – especially in big cities – has been extensively discussed in the media with a few applications also being tested in real life.
How Facial Recognition Systems Works
Human faces are different from other animal and things and can be easily identifiable by software (Facebook and Google are already using extensively this technology).
People are physically different from each other and we can recognize our differences by analysing gender, size, age, specific facial traits and comparing it with our memory (our references).
Each human face has numerous and distinguishable landmarks that our brain is trained to identify (without noticing). This different measures, peaks and valleys make up unique facial features.
Basically, the software identifies one or many faces in the crowd, extract the faces from the rest of the scene and compare it to a database.
Some of the points measured by this software are:
- The face format
- The distance between the eyes
- The shape of the cheekbones
- The length of the jawline
- The width of the nose
- The depth of the eye sockets
The artificial intelligence from the Facial Recognition software identifies the face, analyses its unique points, compares to a database and responds to it according to the desired manner.
The Most Desired Uses of Face Recognition Technology
The uses and commercial benefits of adopting the Facial Recognition Technology are many:
- Customer VIP Identification – Identify your Special Customers and supply the best service available
- Black Listed Customers for Burglary Prevention - Automatically detect the person who is listed in attention database so that the employees could pay extra attention to that person and prevent any incidents
- Incident Management - Manage all customer, visitor, employee and equipment related incidents with automated detection and handling
- Identity Fraud Investigation - Verify the suspicious use of access credentials
- Biometrics for Access Control - High-accuracy face identification can be used for an additional layer of security to the ID card
- Suspect Post Search - Find the suspect automatically from the video recordings using face recognition technology
- Frequency Identification: Returning Customer - Find out the frequency of visits of loyal customers with or without knowing their identity
- Demographics & Customer Profiling for Business Intelligence - Identify the customer by face recognition and link it with purchases for profiling purposes, check conversion rates and also to profile the product segments by demographical acceptance
- Smart Shopping Assistance (Digital Signage) - Display dynamic ads, events' information and promotions based on the age and gender of the customers (targeting the right customers through the right content)
- Advertising campaign optimization - Count the faces of people viewing the advertising displays to assess how much attention they are paying to the ad and evaluate the attractiveness of digital signage by analyzing the audience faces watching it
The Facial Recognition technology has extensive application in several businesses:
ATM/banks, retail chains, commercial buildings, schools, healthcare, hotels, casinos, art galleries, shops, cafes and restaurants, parks, stadium, airports or any other facility
There are also many Smart Business Solutions using artificial intelligence software for security and business intelligence and operational management purposes.
What Security has to do with it?
The Facial Recognition is the great feature already implemented in many businesses.
This technology uses CCTV Security Cameras footage and instantly identifies faces of people looking at the cameras.
As an example, it can identify your customers (VIPs for example) and provides a few personal information to improve the customer service or send alerts to your team about the blacklisted burglars to prevent theft.
It can also have many other smart business solutions using face relevant metadata (including estimated age, gender, emotion and identity for example), to optimize business intelligence and operation management through real-time event handling and comprehensive reports.
Read More About CCTV and Business Intelligence >>
From small shops, restaurants and cafes, through to commercial buildings and retail chains, there are different solutions and equipment that can be combined to fit your specific needs and, at the same time, be very efficient and cost-effective.
For more details about Smart Applications and Business Intelligence tools or Face Recognition Technology, talk to IQ Security Consultants or visit our website.
