Wondering how facial recognition works? If yes then you better stick with this page. Facial recognition is one of the most used technology in today’s time. Tech giants like Apple and Facebook are using this technology for their products. But how it actually works?
To know about it, you first need to understand what is Facial recognition. So let’s just go ahead and head into the topic:
What is Facial Recognition?
In simple words, Facial Recognition is a program which is designed to identify a person face using different patterns based on the person’s facial contours. The technology is mostly used for security purposes or verifying someone’s identity. However, in recent time the technology received a warm welcome from many sectors including smartphones.
How Facial Recognition Works?
Img source: medium.com
As a human being, we are good at recognizing different faces, and that is how we identify who is our friend, family or some celebrity. And we do it by remembering their facial features like how their eyes look, how their nose and mouth looks and the overall face pattern.
And on the other hand, if we talk about a facial recognition system then it also works in the same way. However, it is not as simple as mentioning some lines of codes. Instead, the facial recognition system works on a bigger scale with the help of a powerful algorithm.
Just like we as a human being look at a face, a facial recognition program looks at the data of the face. So the question is how does it actually works?
Well, you can suppose that someone has clicked a photo or video of your face. Now what a facial recognition program does is that it reads the geometry of your face. It looks for the key factors like the distance between your eyes and the distance from forehead to chin. The software identifies facial landmarks and creates a data of your face which is also known as a facial signature.
A facial signature is a mathematical formula which can also be referred to as a database of known faces. Now, whenever you give the facial recognition an image of your face, it calculates the data of your face using the geometric factors and creates a virtual data after that it simply looks into the database and brings you the details.
Who uses facial recognition?
Img source: sytoss.com
There are a lot of government and private organizations that use facial recognition. Here are some of the examples of the same:
U.S. government at airports: U.S. Government uses facial recognition to track the travelers and find if any criminal is boarding the flight or not.
Mobile Phone Makers: Mobile phone makers like Apple uses facial recognition feature to let the user secure their phone with their face data or as Apple says FaceID.
Social media websites: Social media websites like Facebook uses an algorithm to spot faces when you upload a photo to its platform. Also, it allows you to tag people in your photos if you have uploaded a group photo. And when you wish to tag those users, FB automatically recognizes the face and tags them in the photo.
