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Facial recognition technology in SA

Face ID is now available in South Africa. By 2014 Face ID had over 330 000 real installations, more than 40 million end users and 73 patents, making Face ID technology a stable and tested facial recognition option.

Developed by Hanvon, a Chinese company, Face ID offers a Dual Sensor facial recognition algorithm with a false acceptance rate (FAR) of less than 0.0001% and can identity a user in a one-to-many scenario at up to 1400 users in less than 1 second.

2D facial recognition technology uses images as the template matching technique. Although the shape of a persons' face is 3D, 2D flat images are a plane projection of actual faces. So the performance of 2D facial recognition can also be affected by environment light, people’s gestures, expressions, and other factors. 3D facial recognition is based on 3D images, so theoretically it has some advantages, however, the devices that perform 3D facial recognition are very expensive and complicated. (See more at www.hanvon.com)

Dual Sensor technology, patented by Hanvon, adopts two special cameras that function like a person’s eyes. This technology not only retains the advantages of 2D facial recognition, but also combines partial information from 3D facial recognition. It offers fast identification speed and an accurate recognition rate.

Face ID sports a failure to enroll and acquire rate of less than 0.0001%. The company says that while fingerprint technology will have problems enrolling cold and wet fingerprints, as well as with desquamation and reading fingerprints of the elderly (around 5% of people cannot be enrolled with fingerprint technology), this is not the case with Face ID.

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