Facial Recognition – A New Technology or a New Threat?

Facial recognition is a technical way of identifying a human face. Biometrics are used by a facial recognition program to map facial features from an image or video. This compares the data to a set of recognized faces to find a match. Facial recognition can help verify personal identification, but it also poses a threat relating to privacy.

Unlike other biometric systems such as iris or fingerprint recognition, facial recognition is the most contentious. Government agencies use facial-recognition software to identify suspects, and companies may also use the technology to keep sensitive information secure by restricting access to information only to known individuals.

There is a lot of excitement created by facial recognition technology. Of all biometric choices, the most excitement has been attracted by facial recognition, because of recent technological advances. Early systems failed under conditions of low light. Deceivers may use photos and videos to trick them out. Nowadays, all of that has been improved. To achieve live biometric authentication and offer convincing levels of accuracy, today’s systems use technologies, such as 3D mapping. Because of this, smartphone and tablet makers now use facial recognition for their devices and services as the default ‘unlock’ process.

There are many pros to facial recognition. To begin with, security is advanced. One of the main benefits of facial recognition technology is that it increases health and safety. Demand for advanced security and surveillance technologies is growing. Organizations can easily recognize and track anyone who comes to the premises, and guests that are not welcome can easily be identified. Also, facial recognition is quick and accurate.

Getting fast and reliable technology is essential to the ever-growing demand for speed and the rising number of cyber-attacks. Facial recognition technology offers easy, fast, and reliable verification. There is no contact with facial recognition. Owing to its non-contact method, facial recognition is favored over fingerprint scanning. People don’t have to think about the possible pitfalls associated with fingerprint recognition technology.

There are many cons to facial recognition specifically, there are privacy concerns. People say facial recognition is the same as taking samples of your DNA or fingerprints without you thinking about it. Facial recognition helps governments to recognize people. Some worry about the violation of privacy rights, without reasonable limits. Another drawback of facial recognition is that it is not reliable.

Some factors can throw off the facial recognition systems at current rates of growth. For instance, poor quality of lighting, picture, or video may lead to false positives. Slight differences in camera positions or personal images may result in mistakes. There is racial bias in facial recognition. Reports that facial recognition is not as effective in recognizing colored people. For example, a misunderstanding is that facial recognition is necessarily bad for women or people of color to be recognized. Yet, that’s not the case. To learn how to recognize individuals, facial recognition requires a dataset with a large number of examples. There is a lack of regulation on the use of facial recognition.

Governments around the world are yet to enact legislation regarding facial recognition. Consequently, there is no clear structure for its use and its limitations. Nonetheless, there are signs that lawmakers are going to follow suit, and the trend is towards mass facial recognition adoption, and regulators are not catching up fast enough.

Facial recognition technology has come a long way. Machines will now test identity information automatically for secure transactions, surveillance, and security activities and develop access control. For example, facial recognition is used at airports. If you are to go to the airport, you will notice something different as part of the security process, which is a computer will be scanning your face to confirm your identity. As you board on an international flight, airline attendants will request you to point your face to a camera instead of having to show your boarding pass. A little green checkmark will appear on the computer if it matches your identity. Such systems normally run in managed environments and recognition technology can benefit from contextual limitations to achieve high accuracy in recognition.

Parth Patel

My name is Parth Patel. I am a current senior at Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School. My interests include playing majority of sports (basketball, soccer, football), playing video games, and around with my friends. In addition to that, I also like to study, study a lot, and study even more. When I grow up, I want to become an aerospace engineer. I am into technology because it is getting more advanced as we are proceeding in the future and it allows us to access information that we don’t even know about.