As facial recognition becomes more accessible to businesses, the technology has a wealth of use cases across a wide range of sectors – although to win over end users it needs to strike the right balance between convenience and privacy.
Facial recognition is clearly becoming a mainstream technology, with the global market expected to generate US$7 billion of revenue between 2019 and 2024. Surveillance for law enforcement in certain international locations was a key early driver, but facial recognition is also being applied across a diverse range of industries. Take-up is likely to accelerate as
organisations turn to touchless biometrics in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Facial recognition has the potential to be a key technology for reducing physical contact and face-to-face interactions, as well as enforcing COVID-safe rules around social distancing and venue capacity management.
Facial recognition adoption is aided by the fact that organisations aren’t forced to reinvent the wheel and build complex solutions from scratch. The major tech players offer cloud-based services such as Amazon Web Services’ Rekognition and Microsoft Azure’s Face, plus a range of other providers.
Amazon’s Rekognition is an example of a service that goes far beyond simple face matching, with the ability to detect activities and understand the movement. The ability to not just identify people but also understand what’s happening in a scene significantly expands the technology’s use cases and potential business value.
Use cases
The two key applications for facial recognition are surveillance and authentication; each has a range of use cases, but authentication has gained greater acceptance from the general public as its convenience is seen to outweigh the potential privacy implications.
The convenience of unlocking smartphones and some Windows computers, along with logging into apps and authenticating transactions within Apple Pay, has made people more comfortable with the technology. Meanwhile, it is also being used in conjunction with smart passports to speed up immigration queues.
In the age of COVID-19, businesses can apply facial recognition to building access management as part of a COVID-safe plan for their return to work, eliminating the need for staff and guests to check in using communal touchscreen kiosks or rely on reused lanyards.
In a retail environment, facial recognition can be integrated into selfservice checkouts – supporting loyalty card or payments authorisation – to allow completely touchless transactions.
There are also a range of fraud detection applications, with the financial sector already using the technology as a form of two-factor authentication – such as National Australia Bank’s trials with ATM withdrawals and Mastercard’s ‘Selfie Pay’ Identity Check for online transactions.
Meanwhile, more supermarkets are preparing to encourage shoppers to ‘Just Walk Out’ with their groceries – with customers paying automatically thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, machine vision and facial recognition. The technology allows supermarkets to build completely checkout-less stores with minimal staff, to reduce the likelihood of disruption due to staff members testing positive for the virus.
Other use cases on the retail floor include targeted digital advertising and customer tracking as they wander the aisles, right down to the items they take off the shelves, in an effort to understand commercial intent, improve store layouts and optimise stock levels.