Facial Biometrics - The future of convenient identity

Facial biometrics is right now in it’s relative infancy and has a rarified air around it, but increasingly it will be a technology that will be extremely commonplace.
In the past facial recognition was something that was held as proprietory technology by security agencies and the like, but it has since being utilised by other industries as well.
Part of the reason for this shift is due to the need for companies to deploy new hardware in the most cost effective manner, which for items like fingerprint scanners and RFID tags require relatively large investments in hardware and significant renovation costs for the hardwired devices to be placed in the business premises.
However with the advent of wireless video streaming CCTV cameras and simple mounting options, the humble video camera is finding new ways to be relevant. It also does not require user input to be useful. Instead it consistently sends the footage back without needing manual entry 24 hours a day. This has lead to a shift in point of entry systems.
Increasingly also there are more cost-effective platforms which offer the ease of “plug and play” functionality for video streams to be processed online for facial detection and recognition. This has allowed for large numbers of people to be processed in systems quicker than ever before, tracking hundreds of people at a time without a gated entry system.
These platforms have brought down the cost of implementing biometrics significantly from hundreds of thousands of dollars to a few thousand dollars.
We have been exploring facial biometrics for use in our iWorkforce.IO platform, thinking of ways to make it simpler for companies to monitor time and attendance for hourly wage workers. We have also been exploring it’s use in other areas including predictive queue management.

Eventually we can see that it may be a case of walk on a bus and your fare will be paid just be recognising where you got on the bus and where you got off the bus.