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TechNews World

Face-Recognition Systems Looking Better 

By Barnaby J. Feder

June 3, 2004

Making the technology work, however, has required nearly perfect lighting and cooperative subjects, conditions that are not present when trying to pinpoint suspected terrorists and criminals in a crowd.

Face-recognition technology, often touted as a promising tool in the fight against terrorism, earned a bad reputation after it failed miserably in some well-publicized tests of its ability to pick faces out of crowds.

Yet, on simpler challenges, the technology's performance is improving and business has been growing. Major casinos now use the technology to spot card counters at blackjack tables. The United States is planning to require the technology in its next generation of passports. Several U.S. states are using face-recognition systems to check for individuals who have obtained multiple driver's licenses by lying about their identity.

Pinellas County, Florida, recently began deploying the system in police cars so officers can immediately check the people they stop against a database of mug shots. Face-recognition systems use cameras and computers to map an individual's facial features and collect that data for storage in databases or on a microchip on documents like passports.

Making the Technology Work

Making the technology work, however, has required nearly perfect lighting and cooperative subjects, conditions that are not present when trying to pinpoint suspected terrorists and criminals in a crowd. Still, that kind of application remains a goal. This summer in the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology will stage a competition, challenging vendors to cut error rates on systems it tested in 2002 by at least 90 percent, with the results to be published next year.

The prize for top performers bragging rights based on impartial tests is a valuable marketing tool in an industry filled with small companies. For now, sellers of the technology have to deal with plenty of skepticism. "The companies have not done a good job of positioning it, and as a result the technology has gotten a black eye," said Thomas Colatosti, a security consultant and former chief executive of Viisage, one of the few publicly traded U.S. companies in the business.

Damaging Publicity

The most damaging publicity came from tests of face-recognition software and video-surveillance cameras used to search for criminal suspects on the streets of Tampa, Florida, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. The tests have not resulted in a single arrest but have infuriated privacy advocates.

Another system that scanned 100,000 football fans arriving for the 2001 Super Bowl game in Tampa picked out 19 people with criminal records, but none were among those being sought by the authorities.

Nonetheless, major integrators of security technology for governments, like Unisys, Honeywell International and IBM, all support face-recognition technology for some uses. Viisage, based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has seen its stock price double this year, and its major U.S. rival, Identix, based in Minnetonka, Minnesota, has risen sharply, too.

Though the sector remains volatile, some of the strength of those two stocks reflects the success of the companies in diversifying away from dependence on face recognition, said Joel Fishbein Jr., who follows security technology for Janney Montgomery Scott, a brokerage firm in Philadelphia that makes a market in the stocks but does not own any of them. Fishbein said that there was a high percentage of short-sellers in the market, or investors betting that prices will tumble.

Breaking into the Field

Skepticism has also made it hard for entrepreneurs attempting to break into the field with innovations. "It soured the whole market," said Lawrence Schrank, co-founder and chairman of 3DBiometrics, a recent start-up in Boulder, Colorado, that is pursuing the use of lasers to map facial structures. Schrank, a former researcher at Xerox Parc, said that the technology, currently used in medical-imaging equipment, could help the military identify individuals at long distances.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there have been numerous trials of identity-verification technologies at airports. Some involved matching volunteers posing as terrorist suspects to file photos of them on a watch list.

Others tried to match authorized personnel like flight crews with photo databases. The biggest problems were the large number of "suspects" and unauthorized people who passed through control points undetected. Critics, like the American Civil Liberties Union, have also complained that the systems routinely generate "false positives," mistakenly identifying innocent people as suspects.

Too Much Expected?

Analysts and many industry officials say that too much is being expected from the technology, which is one of the newest in biometrics, a field that includes analysis of fingerprints, voices, hand shapes, gait and patterns of the iris. The total biometrics market this year will reach about $1.2 billion, with face-recognition systems accounting for $144 million, according to projections by the International Biometric Group, a research company in New York. Face-recognition revenue should double next year and climb to more than $800 million by 2008, according to International Biometric.

Advocates of face-recognition technology have long promoted it as one of the least intrusive biometrics and potentially the most powerful because it can make use of a huge amount of existing data. "There are 1.2 billion digitized photos of people in databases around the world," said Joseph Atick, chief executive of Identix.

Technology sellers are pursing a variety of strategies to improve the results. Some are developing systems that start with three-dimensional images taken by multiple cameras. Others are developing complex mathematical functions to transform two-dimensional images into three-dimensional models. They are also using software to compensate for poor lighting and to take shadows off a face.

The technical advances are having an impact. Viisage, for example, struggled to achieve a 50 percent recognition rate in tests last year at Logan International Airport in Boston. But Mohamed Lazzouni, the company's chief technology officer, says that Viisage's results would be better than 90 percent if it repeated the trial with its latest technology, including elements brought in when it acquired ZN Vision Technologies of Germany in January.

 
   
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