Facial Recognition Technology Pros & Cons

Since the 1960s, facial recognition technology has developed continuously over the years. This technology is being used to unlocak mobile devices, tag friends in Facebook posts, and detect faces from a video or a crowd. A type of biometric software, facial recognition technology uses deep learning algorithms to compare digital images by mapping out their features to ensure they are the person's correct identity.

Facial recognition offers many benefits to society, such as supporting medical efforts, preventing crimes, and increasing safety. It plays a vital role in law enforcement. According to a report tabled by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, law enforcement agencies use mugshots from arrested individuals to compare them to local, state, and federal facial recognition catalogs. Facial recognition has also been used in major events, such as the Olympics, concerts, and sporting events, to identify people wanted for various crimes. For example, the federal government uses the FBI's Next Generation Identification System, which contains over 30 million facial records in its database.

Facial recognition helps find missing persons. By combining facial recognition with aging software, they have been able to trace and locate children who have been missing for years. The aging software helps them predict how missing children will look like several years later. Upon receiving live alerts, the police can investigate possible matches in real-time.

Facial recognition is also used in different places such as in retail shops, airlines departure gates, mobile phones, social media companies, colleges, and religious places of worship. It offers convenience and helps save time as compared to manual registration. In big businesses and airports, facial recognition is used to check out guests more efficiently and conveniently. It also helps lower chances of information error as guests only look into a camera to authenticate who they say they are. in airports, officials can identify persons traveling on fake passports due to this technology.

People are encouraged to observe social distancing due to the prevailing pandemic. Facial recognition has offered a solution where people don't need to touch a device to collect their fingerprints or come close to a machine to scan their retina.

As with any other innovations in technology, facial recognition continues to have its fair share of disadvantages, even as developers try to improve the technology to make it more accurate and safer. One of the main disadvantages of this technology is that it threatens an individual's privacy and society at large. Although facial recognition aims to make people feel safe and secure, most people are afraid their privacy is being violated since pictures are taken without consent. As a result, law enforcers have been banned from using real-time facial recognition surveillance in Cambridge, San Francisco, and California, where privacy is a big issue.

In addition, it's known that the risk of errors remains real, particularly for certain minority groups. .Many factors influence the quality of facial images, including background and object occlusion, illumination and light reflection, ergonomics, age, gender, skin color and skin conditions.

Another setback of this technology is that the processing of a face relies heavily on the camera angle. Therefore, multiple angles, such as the frontal, profile, and 45 degrees, must be taken to identify a face accurately. Unfortunately, this proves to be problematic in case of obstructions such as hats or facial hair.