Faceprint - TRENDEXPLORER

20 Faceprint

Created at: July 24, 2018

Senior Innovation Analyst Sandro Megerle

Facial recognition has always been a core component of visions of the future and science fiction stories, and it is now on its way to replacing the fingerprint as the unique identifier. A wide range of technological developments and innovations have not only made this technology more precise and reliable, but also enabled it to be used beyond institutional identification purposes.

Besides the use of facial recognition software in public spaces, as is being pursued with most vigour in China at the moment, facial recognition is also deployed in shopping malls, at the product level, such as with the iPhone X (FaceID), and especially in social networks in order to identify and label users in different photos. The benefits of facial recognition in shopping scenarios include the easy identification of users and the related personalization of the customer journey based on previous purchases and other data points linked to the customer’s face. Here too, China and its tech giants like Alibaba, JD.Com and Suning are playing a pioneering role. Facial recognition not only makes it possible to detect customers and their interests, but allows payments to be made and – in the case of Xiaomi – enables access to autonomous, staffless stores via matches with social media profiles.

The advantages of facial recognition when it comes to boosting the efficiency of time-consuming processes like boarding a flight and border checks are obvious, and are already being used by companies and some countries. However, a counter-movement is also developing which takes a more critical view of facial recognition technologies and their, as yet, unforeseeable consequences. At the University of Toronto, artificially intelligent algorithms can subtly change online photos so that the alterations cannot be seen by the human eye but deceive facial recognition algorithms and make it impossible to fully establish an identity. Besides static facial recognition, the latest approaches are working on identification by way of three-dimensional face scans and identifying people’s moods with the help of facial biomarkers and specific facial expressions.