Face Recognition Technology

Face Recognition Technology

Abstract

Face is an important part of who we are and how people identify us. It is arguably a person's most unique physical characteristic. While humans have had the innate ability to recognize and distinguish different faces for millions of years, computers are just now catching up. Visionics, a company based in New Jersey, is one of many developers of facial recognition technology. The twist to its particular software, FaceIt, is that it can pick someone's face out of a crowd, extract that face from the rest of the scene and compare it to a database full of stored images. In order for this software to work, it has to know what a basic face looks like. Facial recognition software is designed to pinpoint a face and measure its features. Each face has certain distinguishable landmarks, which make up the different facial features. These landmarks are referred to as nodal points. There are about 80 nodal points on a human face.
Facial recognition software falls into a larger group of technologies known as biometrics. Biometrics uses biological information to verify identity. The basic idea behind biometrics is that our bodies contain unique properties that can be used to distinguish us from others