Facial Recognition, as soon as you come across this word your mind starts visualizing some security system scanning a face and identifying him/her but that’s limited to the movies. The real world scenario is a little different than that. With time and technology, facial recognition has now been on a high more than ever. Like most of us think, it isn’t only used for security purposes, nowadays; it has spread to variety of applications as well.

In this article you’ll get to know a lot about facial recognition systems, the different classes of facial recognition software. First let’s take a look at each of them separately:

Most of the current facial recognition systems work completely based on nodal points. These software marks the human face with 80 nodal points each measuring some variable (say width of nose, distance between eyes, cheek bone shape and so on). This data from each nodal point is stored as a faceprint within the database. Many of such faceprints are analyzed with the data from faces in an image or video keenly looking for nodal point matches.

However, this facial recognition system suffers from few major drawbacks. This is because basically these systems are not so good in identifying faces like humans can, when the conditions aren’t favorable (say lighting conditions etc.), they may well do below par than an average human can. What can be said is that the level of accuracy these systems exhibit isn’t up to the mark. In other words, these systems are less reliable.

Obviously, a better facial recognition system was needed and researchers could just provide that with the emerging 3D model facial recognition system. This method makes use of the 3D sensors to capture information about the facial features and structures. This 3D facial recognition system means that more distinctive features can be identified and stored. One of the other notable advantages is that we no longer have to bother about the lighting conditions or identification from a variety of angles.

Parallel to this 3D modeling facial recognition system, there is another which is primarily based on the visual details of the skin (say, skin tone or skin texture). This is a higher level of mathematical application where the patterns, spots and lines of person’s skin are arranged in the mathematical space and there you go, the computer does the rest.

Well all that said, facial recognition systems are more advantageous when employed for facial authentication than for identification. This is simply because, its too easy to trick computers using masks or disguises etc.

Also See: How To Improve Your Systems Security With Facial Recognition