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Using Face Recognition Instead of a PIN Number
coondoggie writes "Face recognition as a unique biometric is growing slowly in certain corporate and consumer applications, but researchers at the University of Houston (UH) are trying to make the technology far more ubiquitous and secure: they want it to replace the dozens of personal identification numbers (PIN), passwords and credit card numbers everyone uses every day.
University researchers developed the URxD face recognition software that uses a three-dimensional snapshot of a person's face to create a unique biometric identifier."
What about twins?? The latest advances in face recognition are capable of distinguishing between twins [pdf].
Where it will be used is in fraud scoring. The Alliance and leicester trialled small webcam like devices on ATMs but for some reason took them out of service. Recognition is useful, but it will not be used to block transactions, it will mostly likely be used to raise a score on a fraud profile for a transaction.
This type of fraud profiling is becoming more important because the UK will be moving to Faster payments at the end of 2007 - where once banks had 3 days to run scanning products (for terrorist account activity and fraud) - they will only have a few minutes. The problem at the moment in the UK is that customers do a lot of electronic payments compared to USA - so many transactions will not have time for all the fraud checks.
so if someone who looks nothing like my description makes a transaction, then the score will increase on the account which can then implement further fraud checks in resulting transactions.
when I designed and built a fraud detection system for a UK mobile operator, we found that when a handset/number had fraud committed on it - it usually was usually picked up by lots of the fraud scanners and would stick out like a sore thumb. Each customer would have an associated fraud score and when it reached a certain point, the fraud team would get involved.
You have to consciously enter a PIN to give it away - unless you're fooled by a complete rebuild of an ATM, you're not likely to enter this particular number anywhere else
It has happened over and over again. People use their ATM cards to enter indoor bank terminals (that's pretty common in Europe at least). Crooks have set up key pads and card copying devices instead of the card swipers, successfully copying thousands of cards together with pin code information. Also ATM machines have been successfully and repeatedly modified to copy the ATM cards inserted. A little camera mounted close to the ATM key pad recorded the PIN entered by unsuspecting victims.
but you show your face to everyone in the street, making it trivial to get several photographs of it and even do a 3D reconstruction if desired
If you know how to make such a 3D copy from a few random camera images, a lot of people would pay you wads of cash for that. There was until recently a 3D scanner lab operating at Stanford University (http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/), which used complicated equipment to achieve this task. Even there I'm not sure whether you can reproduce the detail required to pass biometric face verification.
Facial recognition, on the other hand, requires - unless there have been vast advances - very good lighting, a clear image of the face not obscured by sunglasses, intensive make-up or bruises, and no vast changes in hair style or beard growth
Every 1 hour foto shop clerk can tell you how to create consistent lighting for a mug shot. Believe me that biometric equipment makers either have figured this out by now or are going out of business shortly. Believe me, the face being unobscured by sunglasses will be happily provided by its rightful owner if he wants access to a room protected by a biometric verification system or to his money through a biometric ATM machine. Make up is virtually invisible if you work with infrared light - pretty much standard nowadays. If you have ever had any experience with biometric face verification you know that the mouth part of you face is not considered by face verification software because it changes too much - beards, body fat, movable jaws
Image recognition is cost intensive, energy intensive and computationally expensive; a keypad of the highest level, secure and proof against vandalism will cost what? A couple of hundred bucks at most?
I have no idea where you got that from. An infrared flash is vastly less energy intensive as the CRT display of must ATM machines in use today, same holds for LCD. The cost is as close to zero as you want it. As far as computational power is concerned: An Intel Celeron M running at 1.5 GHz does a high quality face comparison in well under a second. So your keypad may be cheaper in the short run. But you forgot about additional costs because people forget their PINs or leave notes with that info lying around where it can be seen by not so honest folks.
To get facial recognition you need light sources that don't interfere with the cameras
Every disposable camera maker has figured this out by now.
the cameras themselves
US$10 buys you decent OEM camera modules doing 640x480 at 30 fps
complex software behind them
Which you need to write once but this has been done already
you need large amounts of data on the facial features. Granted, it might be easy to compress them to a couple of hundred kb's if you're willing to sacrifice some accuracy
Have you every worked with any kind of biometric system before ???? Images of faces are condensed down to a few kB at the moment and yield fantastically low false acceptance and false rejection rates. Even if you compress your mug shot with JPEG, 20 kB can do the job quite well
Problem of false negatives and
The T is for Ten, not Technology
Ah, you blew it right at the end. It's SCUBA apparatus. The other gear is stuff like mask, fins, etc.
Be thankful I couldn't locate you with my RADAR ranging device, you might have been zapped with LASER radiation.
Otherwise, well done.
-- Alastair