Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Face recognition technology is now far enough along and mainstream enough that is it available to the masses. At least if you buy your notebook from NEC.

NEC has launched two new series of laptops with a unique security feature called “face pass” — or, in Japanese, “kao pass.”
The LaVie C and LaVie L series will both include the new facial recognition software, which enables only a programmed user to log on to the computer.NEC’s software, called “NeoFace,” is a biometric system that uses a combination of eye zone extraction and facial recognition to identify the computer’s user. To program the system, a user sets up a profile with three photographs of their face. Then when a user tries to log on, an integrated 2.0 megapixel camera scans their facial characteristics.

The NeoFace system then uses a matching procedure to determine the identity of the user. NEC says that the system performs accurate matching even when people wear glasses and hats, have different haircuts or facial hair, and show different facial expressions. The ability to distinguish between identical twins is still speculative.

“NeoFace uses a technology called ‘adaptive region mixed matching,’ which focuses on ‘segment regions’ with a high degree of similarity for matching,” explained Atsushi Sato, a head researcher at NEC. “Other makers’ products make judgments based on a number of combined characteristics, such as the distance between the eyes and the nose, or the nose and the mouth. But this creates a problem, because if even one of these segments is missing, the accuracy drops dramatically.

“In contrast, NeoFace divides the input image and the registered image into small segments, and focused only on the segments that are highly similar,” he continued. “This enables the system to achieve higher authentication accuracy than out competitors’ products, even if a part of the subject’s face is hidden, for example by a mask or sunglasses.”
‘Face pass’ is latest security system for NEC Laptops

See also:
NEC NeoFace
Advances in Face Detection and Recognition Technologies ( pdf)