What’s Facial Recognition Technology?

🅐 Facial recognition technology is a form of artificial intelligence, specifically a type of computer vision where you have a system that will take a single image called a photo and it will break it down into a mathematical representation of the image. So the computer will take the outline, it will take certain key parameters, often times it will look at the distance between your eyes and your eyes and your ears or your nose and your mouth and using those points it creates a mathematical map of your face. It then will take that and compare it to a database and it will try to say is this photo the same a photo in the database.

🅙 So facial recognition technology is one of a number of different biometric technologies. So biometric means that it's tied to individuals' body measurement that can identify individuals uniquely. And so usually in terms of facial recognition it uses the unique structure of an individual's face, usually by measuring the distance between the eyes, nose, mouth and other key points on the face to make a face print or a face template of individuals and then run that against a database where they attempt to identify with a high degree of accuracy if that person is the same person in the database. So that's what face surveillance does. And it's one of a number of different biometric technologies that we're seeing, both police as well as a lot of private companies begin to implement in a large way in our society right now.