Facial Recognition

How Facial Recognition Works and How to Get Started in 2022

by with No Comment Technology

What is facial recognition? How does facial recognition work?

We’re here to answer those questions and give you a better understanding of this incredibly innovative technology and how to adopt it or adapt to it for your enterprise’s needs.

What is Facial Recognition?

Facial recognition is a technology that matches human faces with biometric data for identification purposes. It’s an innovative method of confirming a person’s identity using unique biometric data based on up to 80 facial nodal points. 

These data points are gathered from images, videos, or real-time footage of people and are generally stored in a secure database for future retrieval.

How Facial Recognition Works

Facial recognition creates a database of facial biometric data. This data is extracted from images or videos in which facial nodes are transformed into digitized data points. 

Step 1: Extract Facial Biometric Data 

  • A person’s face is captured in a photo or video using facial recognition technology 
  • Facial recognition software (such as Intelligent Video Analytics Recorder) analyzes biometric data to create a digitized and unique face profile

Capturing or uploading several images creates better facial feature extractions.

Step 2: Store Facial Biometric Data 

  • Facial biometric data is given a numerical value and is stored to compare against other face profiles in a database such as Gorilla Technology’s Biometric Analytics Provider

Step 3: Retrieve Facial Biometric Data for Identification

  • The facial recognition system connects with the facial data to identify and confirm a face profile
  • It can take up to 0.5 seconds to identify with up to 30 requests per second

Biometric data can also be used to create employee, VIP, and block lists, ensuring that only authorized people can be approved by the facial recognition system.

Key Features of Facial Recognition Systems 

Most facial recognition systems can create and manage face profiles, including easy integrations to third-party systems with APIs.

Depending on the system you adopt, you could have up to 100,000 profiles with demographic data, including gender, age, and more, with an intelligent video analytics management system.

How to Get Started with Facial Recognition

Facial Recognition requires a system that you need to build, manage, maintain, and continuously upgrade. You will need the following key components:

  1. Networked Cameras (to provide an image or video data)
  2. Server (to store and process data)
  3. Facial Recognition software (to analyze data)

Video management software collects videos from security cameras while biometric analytics systems analyze facial biometric data. Having these systems on a network edge will enable your business to perform faster data processing without returning biometric data back to the main server for authentication, saving valuable time. 

Basic Facial Recognition System Architecture

Most facial recognition systems follow a similar flow of data and processes:

basic-facial-recognition-system-architecture

The Growing Widespread Adoption of Facial Recognition

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the widespread use of facial recognition technology as a contactless form of identification. Facial recognition can also be used with other biometric security measures such as fingerprint, iris, and finger vein pattern recognition for multi-factor authentication. 

However, what makes facial recognition stand out from these security measures is that:

  1. It’s a contactless form of identification without touchpoints
  2. It’s more convenient and less intrusive 
  3. It only takes, on average, 0.5 seconds to verify a face
  4. It can quickly identify missing, unauthorized, and dangerous people effectively 

The technology is already in wide use, and applications exist in:

Facial recognition technology is a standard in our daily lives. With advances in AI and faster processors, facial recognition is a technology adopted as a new benchmark for biometric authentication.

Businesses, educational institutes, transportation hubs, and governments need effective systems to manage the flow of people.

For businesses, this could be managing employee attendance and preventing unauthorized persons from entering premises. For transportation hubs, the genuine danger of terrorism demands robust identification systems.

Gorilla Technology: A Market-leading Face Management System Solution Provider

Building facial recognition systems in-house is time-consuming, costly, difficult to maintain, and requires a high level of expertise. 

That’s where Gorilla Technology’s Biometric Authentication Provider (BAP) and IVAR (Intelligent Video Analytics Recorder) come in.

Our out-of-the-box software and hardware solutions were designed with existing AI-level face recognition capabilities to identify and verify facial biometric data.

Get started and check out our video analytics software and how it can be tailored to your enterprise’s business needs, or contact our team directly to schedule a demo.

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smart-transportation-traffic-intersections-1000x562

Smart Transportation – Traffic Intersections

by with No Comment Case StudySolutionsTechnology

Improving the Intersection

Look both ways before crossing – we all learn this when we’re young and pass it on to our children when they start going out in the world. The traffic signal and crosswalk are fundamental pieces in creating and encouraging orderly interactions between motorists and pedestrians – and as safe as they are, there’s always room for improvement.

In this article we’ll give a brief history of the intersection, talk about some safety problems it faces, and demonstrate a solution that’s already showing massive results.

Intersections Are an Evolving Technology

Road intersections have been a part of society for thousands of years, yet traffic signals and crosswalks were introduced less than a hundred years ago.

While most would assume that the introduction of these came with the invention of the automobile, they were actually introduced a bit before cars rolled off the assembly line. It is believed that the first ticket for running a red light was issued just minutes after the first traffic light was turned on.

It should be a no brainer that vehicles should stop at red lights and pedestrians keep to crosswalks. However, that idea gets mixed-up when we see motorcycles or scooters cutting corners by using crosswalks and also when pedestrians start to cross before they get the green light.

However ubiquitous traffic violations are in today’s dense urban environments, it still begs the question – what are their root causes? Is it a failure of urban design to integrate traffic flow, a lack of law enforcement, poor dissemination of road rules, impatient or inconsiderate drivers, or a combination of these?

Cities Need Smarter Solutions

With budget constraints and limited staff on hand to cover their thousands of intersections, cities world-wide need out of the box solutions to improve traveler safety and remind everyone that traffic laws are in place for good reason.

Enter the Smart City

We see news about them nearly every day, but what is a Smart City? Simply put, a Smart City uses different types of IoT devices and technologies to collect data and then use insights from that data to manage assets, resources, and services more efficiently than had they not been implemented. It follows that the room for improvement on systems currently in place is incredibly broad and deserves further classification and a closer look as well as a re-think of those systems.

These IoT sensors and data gathering devices we talk about in regards to the smart city almost always fall into the category of edge devices and some of these perform some of the actual work involved in processing the data gathered.

A Place for Video Analytics and Edge AI

Edge AI, when applied to video data, can turn the unstructured data into actionable and understandable information. Considering systems that might be able to benefit from the application of Smart City concepts, let’s look at our earlier example from the top – the traffic intersection.

smart city traffic

Creating A Smart Intersection

How much would it cost and would it even be possible to have a traffic officer at each intersection, 24/7, and have them log each traffic violation with information like time of day, license plate number, and vehicle make & color? And also have them raise a sign with driver info and a warning each time it happened, and report it all back to HQ as each infraction occurred?

The answer here is obvious, it would take an entire team with specific skills to accomplish this for all intersections and to achieve 24/7 coverage. This is the definition of a fool’s errand. It’s impossible to achieve this with only ‘feet on the ground’.

Now let’s consider a case in which we use video cameras with AI to do all of this. It not only seems attainable, but also very cost efficient.

camera locations

Proving the Edge AI Concept

In a recently published case about how video analytics and edge AI have drastically improved intersection safety and decreased infractions, solution deployment and use proved to deliver a 900% increase in identifying traffic infractions at an intersection in Taiwan – click the button below for the full story:

TRANSPORTATION BUREAU CASE STUDY

It’s important to note that this was all accomplished with existing and available technologies – the future is truly here and is helping law enforcement and overall safety in many public settings.

The Smart City Roll-Out

With more interest in creating new systems and updating older ones to curb traffic violations and increase public safety, companies like Gorilla, which have solutions that can deploy today and also make budget minded sense are poised to take the market lead as cities across the globe continue to roll out solutions.

Thoughts and Further Reading

The instruction to look both ways before crossing should never stop being taught, but we can now cross our streets more confidently with continued improvements in public safety using edge AI solutions to build up Smart City solutions.

To read more about edge AI, click here

For more info on Smart City solutions, click here

You’re also very welcome to contact us at anytime here: Contact Us

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