Nowadays, facial recognition systems have become an integral part of our lives. Research shows that a face plays a significant role while interacting with people, as it elucidates people’s identity, making facial recognition systems a crucial aspect of security solutions in many organizations. As of today, many corporate and government firms are rapidly adopting the face recognition technology across the world due to its invulnerability to threats, reliability, and identifying criminals. Moreover, the face recognition systems provide vast benefits as compared to other biometric security solutions i.e palm print and fingerprint. To have a deep knowledge of how facial recognition systems work is vitally important in order to explore the technical, social, and cultural implications of these systems.
Let’s exemplify a bit how a facial recognition system works!
The system detects if an image has a face in it. If so, the face recognized in one of the two following ways:
Identification:
The system envisages the identity of the face by determining whether the face in the image is likely to match up the faces previously stored in the system or not.
Verification:
The system verifies the identity of the face by determining whether the face in the image matches up a certain face previously stored in the system.
The face recognition timeline demonstrates an arresting maturation of the technology in a quite short period of time. While face recognition and AI can be articulated as different mechanisms, it must be noted that powerful face recognition has been built using some aspect of AI.
Use of AI Facial Recognition at Airport Security
Today, facial recognition has become a norm at many airports around the world. Not many people today hold a biometric passport, which also lets them slide out of the typically longer queues and walk through an automated ePassport control to make it to the gate faster, instead of getting involved with control officers. If used in the same manner, facial recognition can continue to cut waiting times at the passport control and enhance security in and around airports. While some critics are concerned about privacy issues related to the technology, the use of facial recognition at airports depicts improvement in security and revved up processes like ‘check-in.’.
Major Concerns Around Facial Recognition Technology
Recently, the use of facial recognition has turned into a highly debated subject and has been denounced by some experts for being an unethical tool spying on the public. However, the reason for this castigation is mainly due to perplexity, lack of knowledge, and regulation around the technology.
Are lawmakers’ concerns valid?
AI is a powerful tool when it comes to identifying people. However, privacy advocates and legal professionals continue to bring into question the conscience of using artificial intelligence to scrutinize faces without getting the consent of the individual. Moreover, the rise in the ubiquity of facial recognition technology in authoritarian countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Russia that exploit it to probe activists and suppress friction, has waved a red flag among human rights advocates and the most preposterous instance is in China – through facial recognition technology, the government has profiled ‘Uighurs’ and now, the technology is being in use for law enforcement and surveillance incentives in many democracies.
Summing Up…
AI Facial recognition technology has the ability to match faces even in crowded public places against criminal watch lists – register faces that match with criminal watch lists while snubbing the rest of the people. If used proportionately, facial recognition is quite helpful in securing the public and enhancing the overall security on several fronts. Although many benefits of AI facial recognition are notable, inadequate knowledge and lack of regulations of the technology leads to privacy concerns and seemingly keeps on leading organizations to erroneous belief around its use and how it works.