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NEWS/COMMENT

Biometric Technology Today April 2013

...Continued from page 3that the market earned revenues of $5,836.5m in 2012 and estimates this will reach $15,836m in 2021. The research covers security, military, government and law enforcement applications.

It finds that while the market offers immense growth potential, issues related to privacy and proving quantifiable returns on investment will have to be tackled if the market is to take off.

US leads face and voice biometrics market

Following several success stories from government and commer-

cial implementations, face and voice biometric technologies are now well accepted, according to Global Industry Analysts’ ‘Face and Voice Biometrics Global Strategic Business Report’.

According to the report, the US continues to remain the largest regional market, accounting for a majority share in global sales. Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing regional market with sales in the region at a CAGR of about 28.5% over the analysis period. Face biometrics represents the fastest growing product segment with sales at a CAGR 19%.

In Europe, the adoption potential of biometric solutions remains high in commercial shipping and international trade and in immigration control.

AMD APU to include gesture and facial recognition

Chipmaker AMD has introduced a new APU (accelerated processing

unit) codenamed “Richland”, which is shipping to OEMs. Richland is expected to come bundled with new software for consumers including gesture- and facial-recognition.

The follow-on to Richland will be the APU codenamed Kaveri with new heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) features, expected to begin ship-ping to customers in the second half of 2013.

Nuance to use voice-prints to automate password resets

Nuance has launched FastReset to enable employees to reset their

own passwords by speaking, eliminat-ing the need to use IT support people for assistance.

With FastReset, employees use a phone or mobile phone to enrol their voiceprint. When the employee needs to reset their password, they can use the Microsoft Windows login screen or call the automated system to speak a prompted phrase, such as “My voice is my password”. With a successful match of their voiceprint, their password is reset.

FastReset has out-of-the-box integration with Microsoft Active Directory and Credential Provider, and works within an organisation’s existing telephony infrastructure.

Barclays wealth investment management has been using voice biometrics from Nuance since 2012 to streamline authentication when clients call the bank, reports Computer Weekly. The bank has deployed Nuance FreeSpeech in its call centre, which, combined with caller ID, allows a call centre agent to identify customers after a minute of conversation.

Vision-Box puts up biometric periscope

Vision-Box, automated border control systems and electronic identity man-

agement solutions provider, has revealed its biometric periscope for simultaneous capture of face and iris, at a distance.

On detecting the user, the biometric periscope adjusts height and illumination to allow simultane-ous, full-frontal ICAO-compliant iris and face cap-ture and matching. The user can keep walking and does not need to interact with the periscope.

“Many airlines and airport operators have requested from us this additional feature in our products in order to better address the challenges and requirements of the passenger experience,” says Miguel Leitmann, senior vice president.

Vision-Box operates automated borders in more than 30 international airports and over 3,000 electronic identity systems in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

It is now almost two years since Eric Schmidt, chair-man of Google, made head-lines with his comments that Google would “get right up to the creepy line but not

cross it” when it came to collecting personal data such as that used for facial recognition. At that time he said Google had built but ‘withheld’ facial recognition technology. “As far as I know it’s the only technology Google built and after looking at it we decided to stop,” he said.

Schmidt expressed particular concerns about the combination of facial recognition and mobile tracking, fearing the technology could be used against citizens. Lately though, Google is showing renewed interest in biometric and pattern recognition technologies.

PatentBolt reports that Google has finally been granted a patent for its facial unlock technology, which is already familiar to users of Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich. The patent is said to include tweaks to identify ‘liveness’ to address early teething issues of users being able to bypass the system with a photograph.

Google is also reported to be introducing facial recognition capabilities to its Knowledge Graph feature. It has added facial recognition to a feature that provides information about movies streamed from the Google Play store to Android tablets. When users pause a movie, it will display information on the actors and music onscreen. Google uses facial recognition

to identify the actors in the scene that has been paused and searches for information on them.

In the real world, InSight, a partly Google-funded project, is investigating the possibility of using clothes and the patterns on them to help Google Glass wearers identify people in crowded locations, such as shopping centres, reports New Scientist.

The system is based on a smartphone app and camera to generate and share what is rather con-fusingly called a ‘fingerprint’ of a person based on photos captured of them as they use the device. It seems users have to opt in to this and the system only works while they are wearing that day’s outfit.

Commentators are describing this as possibly incremental to facial recognition, which is diffi-cult to achieve in a shopping centre crowd, for example, where people are walking in all direc-tions. A future combination of facial recogni-tion and pattern recognition applied to cloth-ing, powered by the might of Google, could produce an unparalleled force for biometric identification.

This comes as six European data protection agencies began considering legal action over Google’s privacy policy. Late last year a European Commission working party reported that the privacy policy did not meet EC standards on data protection and gave Google four months to comply. That period has now elapsed and the authorities are deliberating as to their next move.

Tracey Caldwell

COMMENT

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