14 Silicon chip Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au
Big Brother may be is watching you!
Facial Recognition
Have you ever had that feeling that “someone is watching you”?
You’re not being paranoid... because the chances are that someone,
somewhere is doing exactly that – from social media apps to government/
law enforcement surveillance systems and possibly even by criminal
enterprises. And while serious privacy concerns have been raised, facial
recognition is also a useful tool for fighting crime and terrorism.
by Dr David Maddison
the name suggests, facial recognition is where
a computer or hardware device determines the
unique characteristics of a person’s face, based
on still images or video, to identify them.
In today’s world of widespread terrorism, identity theft,
criminal activity and online socialising, its use is becom-
ing widespread.
In many cases, people’s photos are available on the in-
ternet – whether they want it or not. Some people may not
even be aware of it.
These photos can be fed into facial recognition software
and used to identify and even track individuals, whether
by government organisations or third parties.
Apart from law enforcement and social media applica-
tions, modern smartphones such as the iPhone X, Galaxy
Note 9 and LG G7 can use facial recognition to automatically
unlock the device for its owner and prevent use by others.
Commercial organisations such as casinos also use fa-
cial recognition to enforce bans against specific individu-
als and for other reasons, which will be discussed later.
Facial recognition comes under the heading of biomet-
ric systems, just like fingerprint or iris
recognition.
But unlike most other biometric sys-
AS
tems, it can be performed without the knowledge or even
cooperation of the subject and is amenable to mass surveil-
lance due to the huge number of cameras already installed
around the world.Use in Australia
Controversially, it is likely that the Australian Govern-
ment will soon have in place a national facial biometric
matching capability with images of a substantial number
of Australians.
These will be “harvested” from passports, driver’s licens-
es, citizenship documents and visa applications as well as
presumably any number of other sources of opportunity.
Various states and government agencies already have
their own systems in operation but the proposed system
will integrate these and other systems on a national basis.
See siliconchip.com.au/link/aan8 and siliconchip.com.au/
link/aan9 for more details.
The Government system will be known as “The Capa-
bility” – not a sinister name at all! See: http://siliconchip.
com.au/link/aana
Facial recognition systems require
large amounts of computer power to be
used in real time; hence, it is only with