Biometric identification and facial recognition

CrunchGear reports on a new product called Lockface USB flash drive from Futen, a Japanese company. The flash drive uses facial recognition to identify its users. According to CrunchGear: “The first thing to do is to register a number of pictures of your face. After that, the Lockface verifies your face every time you need to access data on it (the verification process takes about a second). The USB drive doesn’t require extra software to be downloaded or installed. Alternatively, you can also use a password, completely ignoring the face recognition function of the device. It uses 256-bit AES to encrypt the data. Futen says the device has an error rate of about 2% (it verifies the “wrong” person in 1.91% of cases and won’t verify the right person in 1.98% of cases).”

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Barcodes ‘help face recognition’

BBC News: “Faces are made up of “barcodes” which help us recognise each other, according to scientists. The researchers at Stirling University and UCL manipulated the faces of celebrities such as Marlon Brando and George Clooney for their study. Their results suggested that most of the information needed to identify someone could be found in the lines … Read more