THE NATIONAL: Facial recognition technology could soon tailor shop advertising

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“Governments are highlighting security issues and they’re putting funding into these areas,” says Tim Cootes, professor of computer vision at the University of Manchester in the UK, adding that the US authorities are pushing the sector forwards.

“The ability to identify an individual is considered a priority for security and the digital economy,” he said.

The digital economy is important because businesses are increasingly looking at how they can use facial recognition technology.

It could be used to identify particular individuals that are especially welcome, such as regular store customers or VIP hotel guests, to tailor advertisements to individuals by determining their age and gender, or to highlight undesirables, such as criminals, who should be kept out or monitored. Facial recognition technology involves using a digital video camera to capture images of a person’s face and then calculating values for a number of the face’s “nodal points”.

There are dozens of these, such as how wide the nose is, how far apart the eyes are and how deep the eye sockets are. When added together, they create a faceprint.

Typically, systems now build up a three-dimensional picture.

These systems “are getting reasonably good at verifying if somebody is who they say they are”, according to Prof Cootes.

But in the real world, things tend to be more problematic.

“If they are trying to be recognised, they can make it easy for the system. The systems are making errors of one per cent or less in the lab. As soon as you go outside, the systems are much less reliable because of variations in lighting and appearance,” he says.