The History of Facial Recognition
Work on facial recognition started in the 1960s by three developers to see if computers could recognize human faces, but they were limited by the era’s technology and their reports weren’t published. They did, however, make the step of marking important facial features like the nose and mouth
-In the 1970s, three different people continued the research started in the previous decade, bringing the number of facial markers up to 21
-In the 1980s/90s, two different researchers applied linear algebra to the still-developing concept of facial recognition. This era brought about the use of new algorithms for facial recognition and the earliest known examples of automatic facial detection
-1990s: efforts to encourage the use of facial recognition in the commercial market began
-2010s: Facebook started using facial recognition to tag users in photos posted to the platform. In 2017, the iPhone X was released, introducing Face ID as a way to unlock the device, and this method is still used in phones today
Uses
-An option that can be used to unlock mobile devices, starting with the iPhone X and being used in further Apple devices and a few Samsung devices. Additionally, banking apps have been starting to use it as a quick way to verify their users
-Used for surveillance and security, with the technology being connected to criminal databases. Popular with governments!
-Border control in several places uses facial recognition to match faces to passport photos
-In several social media apps, facial recognition is used to tag which users are present in a photo or apply filters to certain areas of the user’s face while taking a photo