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Biometrics, Bringing the Technology Closer to You |
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Fingerprint and facial recognition technology still comes off as a novel experience to many, even though countless businesses are sprouting up out there around this industry. With the speed of biometric recognition, this response from the general public is not a surprise. The thought of a machine scanning your fingerprint, finding the unique points in it, running it through a hundred other enrolled fingerprints and finding a match, all within a split second does seem stunning; but FingerTec has made this impossible thought possible with the commercializing of fingerprint and facial recognition technology for the time attendance and access control industry.
Here, we take a seat with our Chief Technology Officer of FingerTec Worldwide, Mr. Chong Kah Heng, to give us his input and version of the advanced biometric industry, and the technology that makes FingerTec a leading brand in the market. - by Chong Kah Heng, CTO |
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| Q: |
It is a pleasure to see FingerTec coming out with Face ID 3, the fastest facial recognition model just yet. Could you tell us what makes this technology great? |
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| A: |
We have managed to reduce more than half of the face’s template size by using the compression algorithm, which enhances the image cap- turing quality and eye-zone extraction during enrollment or identification process. The hardware processor’s frequency is improved from 600mhz to 800mhz and we have simplified the work flow of the face identification process and shortened the processing time. In short, we enhanced the core technology of the face recognition and identification algorithm. |
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| Q: |
Fingerprint technology has been dominating the market for more than a decade and with the facial recognition technology be- ing introduced to the market, would the trend shift in the coming years, in your opinion? |
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| A: |
Fingerprint technology’s quality has improved over the years and people have started to build their trust on the technology. Talking about
accuracy, reliability and stability, fingerprint technology is still unbeatable. Smaller storage space is now required for fingerprint templates, reducing the size of the database memory required and increasing the amount of user template capacity.
The market is still warming up to the other biometrics technologies and I think it might take sometime for the technology to make an impact as fingerprint (technology) does. People have concerns on disadvantages of fingerprint which could be compromised by the fingerprint’s condition and aging process.
The fact that face recognition offers something new such as contact- less, low maintenance and lower privacy issue is appealing. But again, the market is still not comfortable with its medium accuracy and higher FAR & FRR rate if compared to fingerprint. There are other issues in facial recognition technology such as sensitivity to strong lighting and variety of poses that studies need to be further done. Currently, we are still not able to support large amount of users due to the larger size of the face template compared to fingerprint (30-40x) and the identical-twin issue are among the concerns that we are looking at.
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| Q: |
People get turned off when a technology product lags on them. It is amazing that the FingerTec Face ID 3 can capture and recognize the facial image in split seconds; how unique is human face and in what circumstances it could affect the reading of the faces? |
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| A: |
Every human face is different, just like a fingerprint. Imagine fingerprint in its larger form. The Face ID 3 recognition analyses every aspects of the face images that is captured through a digital video camera. The overall facial structure is measured including distances between eyes, nose, mouth, and jaw edges. All these measurements are stored in a database and used as a comparison when a user stands before the camera. The Facial Recognition Technology measures the distance between the eyes, width of the nose, depth of the eye sockets and many more. The measurement of these points, known as nodal points creates a numerical code, called a faceprint, representing the face in the database. |
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| Q: |
Iris technology also is another commercialized biometrics technology apart from palm and vein that have been introduced to the masses. Is there any kind of biometrics technology that you think would be of interest to the researchers? |
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In my opinion, it’s voice recognition, where verification is done against a stored voice pattern, and not what is being said. Voice is unique but still, the biggest hurdle is to avoid fakery using a tape recording; if you are good at imitating other people’s voice, it could be done. According to a Unisys survey, the biometric measures ranked by consumer preference are: voice recognition, then fingerprint, and followed by other technology measures. This ranking shows that people choose convenience and familiarity when it comes to biometric technology. |
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| Q: |
Privacy is a major issue of concern when we talk about bio- metrics. People certainly do not want to get fooled by any kinds of technology. Is biometrics fool proof? Should people totally lay down their guard when using biometrics technology? |
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| A: |
Granted, there is a basis on which users have the right to feel worried about the security of their fingerprint information. Just take one look at any spy movie and you can see how these ideas have made people be on their guard. The beauty of the fingerprint technology at FingerTec is that during enrollment, the machine does not scan the whole image of the fingerprint for storage. Instead, it uses minutiae points, which means that it picks several points on the fingerprint to scan, enroll, and verify. This makes it hard for any party to duplicate a fingerprint from the enrolled information. Of course, if there is a real will to steal your fingerprint, there are many ways someone can go around it eg: by lifting it off things that you have previously touched and so on. I guess my point is that, FingerTec has a fairly safe system to enroll fingerprints but when it comes to security, there is always a backdoor no matter what precautions you take. |
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| Q: |
Software is a major part when the deployment of biomet- rics technology and FingerTec was made popular by its TCMS V2. What would be the impact of the newly introduced TimeTec on the market and having customers from around the globe, what do you see as your possible challenges when the implementations are on high gear? |
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We were really pleased that we released TimeTec this year after months of effort. What not many people may know about TimeTec is that it uses push technology to communicate with FingerTec terminals, and we may even be a pioneer for using such a technology with bio- metric devices. I think the main impact for FingerTec is that we are now able to target larger markets and multi-national companies who operate from global branches, to use this technology as with TimeTec, data can be centralized from anywhere in the world. However, the initial implementation and deployment of TimeTec can be a little complicated to set up if the installer does not have the prior experience with serverbased programs. Our next step would be to work on simplifying the process to gain a higher appeal to the larger markets. |
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| Q: |
Various industries are attempting Cloud technology. How open is FingerTec to the idea? |
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Cloud technology has quite a few advantages such as not hav- ing to go through the trouble of setting up your server, having more flexibility and more mobility. FingerTec will be implementing a cloud version of TimeTec in 2012, and will be looking into collaborating with Amazon to host the servers on their highly reliable Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform. It is an exciting year for us at R&D and my team and I are looking forward to working with them (Amazon)! |
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| Q: |
FingerTec is exceptional when it comes to time attendance software, do you have any plans to sit at par with the other more established security brands? |
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Yes, in fact, we do. Right now, the (R&D) team is working on FingerTec’s all new Access Control application code name Rabbit, estimated to be released on the 4th quarter of 2012. It would be a total solution combining web based, windows based, and mobile based application with a MySQL database working with FingerTec’s access control models. It will have many attractive features such as advanced graphical floor plan monitoring and car park management features. As you can see, FingerTec is expanding to create a full solution system which would appeal to our clients in the long run. |
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| Q: |
What would be the next trend in biometrics technology? |
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Two strongly emerging systems are vein pattern readers and iris recognition. Vein recognition is normally associated with higher-level security because unlike fingerprint and facial recognition which varies from childhood to adulthood, veins in the palms of our hands do not. It is fixed since we are born and is unique to each individual, which is more favorable for more long term use, such as social security records and so on. FingerTec has plans and will be welcoming vein recognition technology to its family of biometric products in its near future. |
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