As terrorists and criminals increasingly mingle with the public, biometrics-based solutions like facial recognition become useless.
The biometrics industry is developing rapidly, providing increasingly accurate solutions for identity recognition and management. The technology is becoming more and more popular as terrorist and criminal concerns rise and places like airports and train stations need to protect people and infrastructure. But as terrorists and criminals increasingly mingle with the public and frequently move between countries, biometrics-based solutions like facial recognition become useless as a vast majority of potential suspects will be unknown to the authorities. This is where a technology that goes beyond biometrics becomes relevant.
Faception, a Tel-Aviv, Israel-based company, offers a computer vision and machine learning technology that analyzes a person’s facial image and automatically reveals their personality, enabling security agencies to efficiently detect, focus and apprehend potential terrorists or criminals before they have the opportunity to cause harm. In other words, the solution would let you know whether an anonymous individual is a potential threat.
Detecting personality based on facial image
According to Shai Gilboa, CEO and Co-founder of Faception, its solution is the first of its kind with proprietary computer vision and machine learning algorithms that reveal a person’s personality based on his facial image. Faception can analyze faces from video streams, recorded or live, databases or online sources, encode the faces in proprietary image descriptors and match an individual with various personality types.
“Our solution is SaaS, and can be adaptive/API on any of the current facial recognition/authentication solutions,” Gilboa said. He believes that the solution can be complementary to conventional facial recognition systems. While the latter will focus on known suspects, the former can be on alert for anonymous threats.
The company develops proprietary classifiers, each describing a certain personality type or trait such as an extrovert, person with high IQ, professional poker player or a terrorist. Faception claims to be able to score facial images on a set of classifiers and provide their clients with a better understanding of their customers, the people in front of them or in front of the cameras.
Understanding people to understand threats
Gilboa added that the idea for Faception was born after a discussion with a colleague who had top notch interpersonal skills and a great track record at closing deals.
“One night after a few drinks at a local bar, I pushed him to disclose his secret sauce,” he said. “Well, he said, my father was a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to NYC and worked as a door to door insurance agent. He converted prospects to clients by observing their faces, interacting with them based on his observations, and earning their trust and business. He told me ‘you can go to the best college, but understanding people is the only skill that really matters’. As for me, he said, it’s a gift I have and that’s my secret sauce. I was intrigued. I started investigating the field and found several scientific articles supporting the theory that a person’s personality is reflected in his face. Several experiments were conducted, but there didn’t seem to be a scalable technology in place.”
This is when he met David Gabriel, who had been working as a profiler for a consulate and Itzik Wilf, a computer vision and machine learning professional. Together, they founded Faception.
Demand for Faception
The company expects demand for its solution to rise as the need to detect anonymous threats and need for predictive screening, while protecting privacy, increase. Faception definitely focuses on solving a problem that has hitherto remained untouched and hence it does indeed have a strong chance of market adoption. That it can support a security system that’s already in place makes it all the more attractive.