Smiles, winks in face recognition could increase phone security

New York: As hackers find ways to unlock your phone with your face while you sleep or using a photo from social media to do the same, researchers have developed a way to strengthen security by adding facial features such as smiles and winks to the mix.

D.J. Lee, Professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) in the US, who has filed a patent on the tech already, said the idea is not to compete with Apple or have the application be all about smartphone access.

In his opinion, the new technology has broader application, including accessing restricted areas at a workplace, online banking, ATM use, safe deposit box access or even hotel room entry or keyless entry/access to your vehicle, BYU said in a statement.

The new system is called Concurrent Two-Factor Identity Verification (C2FIV) and it requires both one’s facial identity and a specific facial motion to gain access.



To get technical, C2FIV relies on an integrated neural network framework to learn facial features and actions concurrently.

This framework models dynamic, sequential data like facial motions, where all the frames in a recording have to be considered — unlike a static photo with a figure that can be outlined.

Using this integrated neural network framework, the user’s facial features and movements are embedded and stored on a server or in an embedded device and when they later attempt to gain access, the computer compares the newly-generated embedding to the stored one.



In their preliminary study, Lee and his PhD student Zheng Sun recorded 8,000 video clips from 50 participants making facial movements such as blinking, dropping their jaw, smiling or raising their eyebrows as well as many random facial motions to train the neural network.


Currently, with the small dataset, the trained neural network verifies identities with over 90 per cent accuracy.


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