By Roland Piquepaille
The CTO of XID Technologies, a biometric security company based in Singapore, has been nominated for this year's World Technology Awards (WTA) for the development of an adaptive face recognition technology involving face synthesis. The technology, marketed under the name XID SmartID, permits for example to compare the biometric data embedded on a passport and the live data of a person at an immigration counter or passport verification booth. This face synthesis technology is currently used in Singapore, SmartID has been deployed at the Immigrant Workers Dormitory in Kaki Bukit to provide access clearance for about 6,000 workers day or night across 16 channels of entry.How does this technology work?
The SmartID technology takes specific points on a face and applies numerical values to each in order to arrive to a feature vector which is stored in the database. From one 2D facial image, various conditions such as lighting, facial rotation, a beard or the wearing of spectacles are then synthesised to effectively create many faces from the original facial image. A feature vector is then derived for each synthesised face and these vectors then stored in the database.
Each time a person passes through the access channel, his or her image is matched against the database of synthesised feature vectors.
You can see below how the technology is used to grant access to a building for instance. (Credit: XID SmartID)
And is this technology available and reliable? Apparently yes.
The technology is currently being marketed as the XID SmartID system under XID Technologies, which CTO Mariani co-founded with directors Myles Kendrick and Charles Francisco.
In Singapore, SmartID has been deployed at the Immigrant Workers Dormitory in Kaki Bukit where it is used to provide access clearance for about 6,000 workers day or night, rain or shine, across 16 channels of entry.
And the technology can be used to recognize the ID of a person from many different devices, including memory cards, smart cards, barcodes, scanners, OCR readers, speech recognition and even license plates
Don't you think it looks like Minority Report?
Source: Tan Ee Sze, Computerworld Singapore, Vol. 10 Issue No. 26, 12 - 24 August 2004; XID Technologies website
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