The continued proliferation of digitization and innovations in the security world has emerged the demand for struggling for data security and privacy side by side with streamlined processings and better user experience. Legitimate businesses, financial institutions, corporations, and even the government is looking for technological solutions to take responsibility for security within the respective sector. Getting precise, facial recognition technology is an emerging technology to be used for the purpose if face verification. A subcategory of biometric verification which emerged with fingerprint scanning and now spreading its wings to facial recognition and iris/retina scanning.

Facial recognition technology is now a new big thing used in multiple sectors for security purposes and customer scrutiny. Not only smartphones, but online businesses are using this technology to verify their onboarding customers through their facial features. In the surveillance and police departments, facial recognition technology is used to detect and monitor the criminals. E-commerce and online travel agencies are using facial recognition technology to authenticate the customers while providing them a better user experience at the same time. This streamlines the process of face verification without any headache of manually verifying the customers.

Spoof Detection

The fast adoption of face recognition systems by traditional verification methods comes up with some challenges that face recognition technology skillfully caters. Being a biometric, face verification is a threat when it comes to identity theft. Any sensitive data company is collecting is at a high risk of being stolen and used for malicious purposes by the fraudster. For this, facial recognition technology needs an additional security layer to protect the sensitive database.

A face spoofing attack is one of them. It is an attempt by the fraudster to fool the facial recognition system using tricks to substitute someone else’s face, using a photograph, some video recording or 3D mask, etc. in case of success in the spoofing attack, the fraudster will be able to get the privileges rights to the account of the actual person and get the credentials and personal information of the victim for malevolent purposes.

How to prevent it?

In facial recognition technology, anti-spoofing procedures and techniques are used to deter the risks of spoofing attacks. For spoof detection, liveness detection is done that ensures the presence of the person and detect liveness. It makes sure that the face is alive and not a fraud attempt. These two main approaches are used for liveness detection.

Active approach: In this approach, the user is asked to interact with the system to prove his presence. This could be by the moving face before the camera or talking to the system or computer may ask the user to do some actions to prove the presence.

Passive approach: In this approach, there is no need to interact with the system, and liveness detection is done otherwise. The computer does it on its own and user has nothing to do with it.

In this way, the ventures for facial spoofing will be eliminated and smooth facial verification can be done. Artificial intelligence facial recognition software provide with better decision making for the purpose of identity verification. They are trained and tested with a huge database and at run time, used to differentiate between spoofed and real face.

Future of Face Recognition Technology

Face biometrics is the most acceptable modality among other biometric modalities. With the advancements in Artificial intelligent applications, face verification has become more accurate and error-free. The training data is dealt with AI-based techniques, and facial features just like other biological traits are matched and denied respectively. The inclination of face verification solutions and adopted by industries at a high pace, this development can take face authentication to new heights.

From surveillance purposes to the medical industry to financial institutions, facial verification will become a need in no time. Additionally, social media networks are now using this technology and will be using it in future with much-advanced use-cases and features for entertainment.

The only limitation corresponds to the phishing attacks and synthetic identity theft, in which individuals using smart devices and industries installing face verification solutions must counter on their behalf. It is the utmost responsibility for the organizations to keep public data save to avoid regulatory fines and comply with the respective legislation.