The identification of human beings has been evolving over the years. And recently we can see it in the smartphone industry. First, there were PIN codes and passwords. After that came fingerprint sensors which allowed us to unlock our phones by touching a home button. And the most recent change was upgrading to facial recognition.
This technology allowed our devices to recognize us just by looking at our faces. They are a big trend, especially in casinos. No matter if we are on the move or our face is in the dark or we wear glasses or have messy hair. Still, our face is the ideal and accessible ID method. Before it has found mass adoption, facial recognition has had some challenges. Some of them were that anyone could unlock our phone by holding a picture of our face in front of their face. But not anymore, that was the ugly past. These problems have been solved.
There were a few companies running after facial recognition, it was hard and complicated. At the moment, Apple has the fastest and most secure facial recognition software. It is implemented in the newest iPhone series, starting with iPhone X.
How does it work?
When you enable your facial recognition, a 3D projection of your face is created. For this reason you have to move your head in a circular matter so the camera captures all the angles of your face. Along with this, all distinctive features of your face are captured. Special attention is being employed for the contour of your nose and eye sockets, chin, nose and other features of the face. To get these projections, structured light is being projected onto the face.
All of this very important identifiable data is being kept on your device. It is never being uploaded to the cloud, also known as the internet. Security is being taken very seriously when it comes to both your fingerprint data and facial ID data.
What Phones support Face Recognition?
Well, any flagship phones past 2017 have some form of facial recognition. And it will continue to be the case in the future. More refinement will be applied to the technology.
Does Facial Recognition work in Complete Darkness?
Yes it does. This is being done by the use of the infrared lighting. The phone already has an infrared scan of your face so it can compare it very easily. This is why it works in low lighting as well as complete darkness. However, face ID will not work with every single sunglasses in the world. Of course it will work with most, just not with all the shades of black glass. Fun fact: Facebook uses facial recognition to recognize you when there is a photo of you somewhere on facebook. That is how you get notified every time. However, if this is something quite creepy to you, you can disable this feature, according to Facebook itself. I have not personally tried to disable this feature so I can’t confirm this but you are welcome to try.
This new technology is young but it is developing rapidly, so you can expect to see another version of it in the phones next year. More and more companies will include it and maybe next year we’ll see facial recognition in some of the mid range phones.