[isml] Facial-recognition tech has people pegged (fwd)

[Jim Windle]

There is a very interesting and pretty thorough article on iris recognition in the current (July-August) issue of "American Scientist".  The site has an abstract of the article and some links:

http://www.americanscientist.org/articles/01articles/Daugman.html 

Jim Windle
--

On Wed, 18 Jul 2001 18:58:11   Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
>-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
>______________________________________________________________
>ICBMTO  : N48 10'07'' E011 33'53'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204
>57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 12:51:40 -0700
>From: DS2000 <ds2000 at mediaone.net>
>To: isml <isml at yahoogroups.com>
>Subject: [isml] Facial-recognition tech has people pegged
>
>From CNN,
>http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/07/17/face.time.idg/index.html
>-
>Facial-recognition tech has people pegged
>
>July 17, 2001 Posted: 1:01 p.m. EDT (1701 GMT)
>
>By Emelie Rutherford
>
>(IDG) -- Forget ID badges, passwords and access cards. Pretty soon, to get
>in and out of your office you might start using something you can't forget
>or misplace: your face.
>
>Once the stuff of science fiction, facial recognition technology has started
>to appear in real-life buildings and public places. Setups consist of
>cameras that capture images of people who pose or simply walk by, and
>software that matches those pictures with those stored in a database.
>
>Institutions of all kinds -- such as those that want to protect buildings or
>internal networks and banks in need of greater security for ATMs -- have
>recently begun to use facial recognition to verify users. Physical access
>control will be the main source of revenue for biometrics companies over the
>next five years, according to Marlene Bourne, a senior analyst for emerging
>semiconductor applications at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Cahners In-Stat Group.
>Currently, though, it is being used most in casinos (more than 100 across
>the country have facial recognition in operation) and neighborhoods (the
>city of Tampa uses it in outdoor cameras to spot missing children and
>lawbreakers).
>
>Facial recognition is a technology that has been around for a while.
>University scientists have been working on facial recognition for over a
>decade, with financial support from the U.S. Defense Department, in an
>attempt to find a technology that can spot criminals at border crossings.
>Companies began commercializing the technology in the mid 90s. It made
>headlines last February, when word got out that authorities used it at Super
>Bowl XXXV in Tampa to search for felons and terrorists among the crowd of
>100,000 spectators.
>
>Facial recognition technology falls under the umbrella of biometrics,
>technologies that identify people based on features such as faces, hands,
>fingerprints and eyes. Electronic readers can be affixed to entryways,
>keyboards, laptops and mobile phones. The biometrics market rose from $6.6
>million in 1990 to $63 million in 1999, according to the San Jose-based U.S.
>National Biometrics Test Center. And pundits say it will continue to grow
>substantially, fueled by companies in need of more advanced security
>precautions. Cahners In-Stat Group predicts sales of biometrics will reach
>$520 million by 2006.
>
>While other types of biometrics, such as iris scanning, are even more
>accurate than facial recognition (which has a relatively low error rate;
>just under 1 percent), facial recognition will probably be accepted more
>widely because it is not intrusive. It does not require that the user push,
>insert or click on anything. Companies often do not need to install anything
>beyond the new software because most already have cameras in place and
>pictures of employees on file -- making it cheaper than iris reading setups.
>
>"Unlike other biometrics, facial recognition provides for inherent human
>backup because we naturally recognize one another," says Frances Zelazney,
>the director of corporate communications at Visionics, a leading biometric
>developer based in Jersey City. "If the system goes down, someone can pull
>out an ID with a picture as backup, something you can't do with fingerprint
>devices."
>
>How it works
>Visionics' FaceIt software measures a face according to its peaks and
>valleys -- such as the tip of the nose, the depth of the eye sockets --which
>are known as nodal points. "While a human face has 80 nodal points," says
>Zelazney, "we require only 14 to 22 to do the recognition. We concentrate on
>the inner region of the face, which runs from temple to temple and just over
>the lip, called the 'golden triangle.' This is the most stable because if
>you grow beard, put on glasses, put on weight or age, that region tends no
>to be affected, while places such as under chin would be."
>
>FaceIt plots the relative positions of these points and comes up with a long
>string of numbers, called a faceprint. The software matches faceprints in
>the existing file with those of the people passing in front of the cameras.
>Faceprints can also be stored on a smart card that users swipe through a
>door without looking into a camera.
>
>Visionics' main competitor, Littleton, Mass.-based Viisage Technology, has a
>slightly different model. Its software compares faces to 128 archetypes it
>has on record. Faces are then assigned numbers according to how they are
>similar or different from these models.
>
>The use of facial recognition technology upsets some civil libertarians, who
>call covertly scanning people's faces an invasion of privacy. Soon after
>Tampa installed cameras in nightlife neighborhood Ybor City in June, House
>Majority Leader Dick Armey issued a statement blasting the program's
>Orwellian aspects.
>
>"The technology is blind as a bat if you're not in the database," counters
>Zelazney. "It's not automatically adding people to the database. It's simply
>matching faces in field-of-view against known criminals, or in the case of
>access control, employees who have access. So no one's privacy is at stake,
>except for the privacy of criminals and intruders."
>
>--
>Dan S
>
>
>[ISML] Insane Science Mailing List
>
>- To subscribe: http://www.onelist.com/subscribe.cgi/isml
>
>
>
>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>


Join 18 million Eudora users by signing up for a free Eudora Web-Mail account at http://www.eudoramail.com