How businesses use face recognition to enhance security

More and more businesses are using face recognition technology to improve situational awareness. Doing so gives businesses a smarter, easier way to monitor who is entering, staying and leaving their environment, while also increasing safety, security and convenience.

Doug Aley, CEO of Ever AI, noted that “mission-critical” applications form about 75 percent of the face recognition market. This includes use cases such as security surveillance, access control, digital authentication and government and law enforcement applications. According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the increased need for enhanced surveillance and monitoring at public places and the increased use of the technology in industries such as the government are driving the market growth.

While the main purpose of deploying a facial recognition solution is security, it is also about “empowering individuals to use their faces as a token to gain fast safe access and authentication,” said Dan Grimm, VP of Computer Vision and GM of SAFR at RealNetworks.
 

Facial recognition is “ideal” for environments that need to positively identify individuals for physical and data security clearance, general access permissions, compliance with mandated regulations, and financial verification, according to Shawn Mather, Director of Sales for the U.S. at Intelligent Security Systems (ISS).  

In a business environment, such as retail, “this could mean leveraging footage of different shoplifting incidents, assembling a suspect watchlist using frames from video surveillance, and then responding to alerts triggered by a video content analytics (VCA) system’s detection of a biometric match for the suspected shoplifter,” explained Stephanie Weagle, CMO of BriefCam. From there, security or police officers could investigate further to determine whether the alert has correctly identified the shoplifter and, if so, apprehend the perpetrator before the store bears further losses.

Facial recognition can also be used to provide live analytics for industries where there are high numbers of unknown visitors (e.g., malls, retail spaces, event venues, stadiums, etc.). This also applies to large enterprises with high visitor flows, such as hospitals, universities and stadiums, that have a need to know when persons of interest appear on camera.

Grimm used a sports stadium as an example. Stadium operators might flag banned patrons in its database, while box owners may want notifications when VIPs are onsite, in order to properly greet them and provide a superior level of customer service.

“To support effective ‘watchlists’ — both for threats/concerns and for VIPs — facial recognition systems must be adept at high accuracy under the real-world conditions of identifying people in live video. This means avoiding false positive matches and reliably identifying people despite variations in lighting, orientation and facial occlusions due to scarves, glasses and hats,” Grimm explained.

Customers from schools, office buildings and manufacturing are also using facial recognition to provide secure access to facilities. “In these cases, facial recognition systems enhance security in ways that are superior to badges, which can be easily stolen, and also offer features that catch piggybacking instances to offer a more accurate assessment of who is entering and exiting,” Grimm explained.

Face recognition can also enhance convenience over existing access management solutions. For example, with face recognition users no longer have to deal with situations where badges are forgotten at home or left on a desk. Grimm added that for secure access, facial recognition solutions should include anti-spoofing to prevent unauthorized access to those attempting to use a photo to gain entry.