FaceTec is an application designed to improve the security of facial recognition: the person's face is analyzed from multiple perspectives
More and more companies are integrating within their smartphones the function to unlock the smartphone through face recognition. The feature is very useful, but not very secure. In fact, it has been shown that you can fool the sensor for face recognition quite easily.
How do you fool a face scanner? Simple, just show the sensor a photo of the device's owner. Luckily, a start-up company, called FaceTec, has claimed to have made a very secure facial recognition scanner. A new system of protection, therefore, against hackers and malicious. The FaceTec software is safer than others on the market because it is able to recognize if the face of the person in the picture is flesh and blood or if it is only a photograph.
How FaceTec works
To achieve this result, the developers have used machine learning, teaching the software to recognize the differences between an image and a real face. To use the app on our smartphone, once installed, all we have to do is follow the instructions for recording our face. We'll have to take shots from different angles, so that the app can save an image of our face in three dimensions. At this point each frame of our face is analyzed by the software to understand any shadows on the face, skin texture or likely reflections given by the screen based on lighting conditions. It must be said, however, that the app doesn't use deep machine learning techniques because it is designed to take up as little space as possible on our smartphone. In fact, the company's goal is to be able to allow the use of the app on both top of the range phones, iPhone and Android, as well as entry-level. In order to improve the functioning of the application, the start-up went to the famous wax museum Madame Tussauds to train the algorithms to distinguish the differences between a reproduction and a real human face.