Facial Recognition in Physical Security

With the passage of several federal laws and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, there has been a renewed emphasis on physical security and a resurgence of interest in biometrics. Biometric identification is the process of automatically identifying an individual based on something about him – something he is or does. This renewed interested has recently focused on one particular biometric technology – facial recognition. Several facial recognition software algorithms are being used to look at the many data points available on the face for use in identification and verification. The more common ones will be defined and briefly discussed. Facial recognition is usually employed in one of three scenarios: one-to-one verification, one-to-many watch-list searches, and surveillance. One-to-one verification is typically used in access control scenarios while one-to-many searches are used for watch-list searches and surveillance. Watch-list applications typically collect an image in a controlled environment and compare it to a list of “wanted” images. Surveillance implies extracting an image from a scene that may contain many faces and attempting to identify the person in the image.