By Christopher Mims
It was a memorable moment in Pixar's 2004 classic "The
Incredibles," one that seemed wildly futuristic at the time: Mr.
Incredible picks up a wafer-thin tablet computer, and it scans his
face to verify his identity before divulging his secret
mission.
Thirteen years later, many slim phones and tablets unlock with
the press of a thumb -- and just this sort of mobile facial
scanning is on the way.
Forget fiddling with passwords or even fingerprints; forget
multiple layers of sign-in; forget credit cards and, eventually,
even physical keys to our homes and cars. A handful of laptops and
mobile devices can now read facial features, and the technique is
about to get a boost from specialized hardware small enough to fit
into our phones.
Using our faces to unlock things could soon become routine,
rather than the purview of spies and superheroes.
Qualcomm Inc., an industry leader in mobile device chips,
recently introduced its Spectra imaging system, which can extract
depth information from objects including faces. The company plans
to include the technology in a forthcoming generation of its
flagship Snapdragon mobile processors. Meanwhile, when firmware for
Apple Inc.'s forthcoming HomePod speaker leaked online, developers
spotted clues suggesting that an upcoming iPhone might have similar
depth perception and facial recognition.
This technology is different from, but related to, the facial
recognition increasingly built into security cameras around the
world, which cross-references pictures of your face against
databases of millions. That tech is growing in capability and in
use -- especially in China, where its applications range from
surveillance to payments.
Fortunately, your phone's camera has a few advantages over
surveillance equipment. It doesn't need to spot you in a crowd. It
just needs to distinguish one face -- yours -- and it can do that
very well, since you're not some shadowy figure captured in bad
light. From a foot or two away, your phone can quickly capture a
detailed image.
There's another advantage. Depth-sensing technology, generally
called "structured light," sprays thousands of tiny infrared dots
across a person's face or any other target.
By reading distortions in this field of dots, the camera gathers
superaccurate depth information. Since the phone's camera can see
infrared but humans can't, such a system could allow the phone to
unlock in complete darkness.
While Apple hasn't announced any use of this technology -- let
alone confirmed whether it will exist inside the widely expected
10th-anniversary iPhone -- the company is no stranger to infrared
depth-mapping and facial recognition. It has previously been
granted patents describing nearly identical processes. Apple
declined to comment on any technology it might be working on.
If this technology sounds familiar, it's a sort of shrunken-down
version of the Xbox 360's Kinect motion sensor. Perhaps not
coincidentally, Apple acquired an early Kinect developer, the
Israeli startup PrimeSense, in 2013.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm says it plans to make its Spectra processor
available for future Android phones. Previous Samsung image
processors that did face recognition could be fooled by holding up
a photo of someone's face to a phone's camera. Qualcomm insists
that depth perception gives the added bonus of "live-ness
detection." As a result, a 3-D printed mask wouldn't be able to
fool the system, though the company admits identical twins
might.
Teaching our phones what our faces look like will be just like
teaching them our fingerprints, says Sy Choudhury, a senior
director at Qualcomm responsible for security and
machine-intelligence products. An image of your face is captured,
relevant features are extracted and the phone stores them for
comparison with your face when you unlock the phone.
As with fingerprint recognition, the facial images are securely
stored only on the device itself, not in the cloud. History -- from
Apple's battles with domestic law enforcement over unlocking
iPhones to Amazon's insistence that the Alexa doesn't upload
anything until it hears its wake word -- suggests companies will
use this privacy as a selling point.
Already, laptops use Microsoft's Windows Hello face recognition
for easier unlocking; some devices are equipped with Intel's
RealSense 3-D depth camera, which preceded Qualcomm's Spectra.
As technology like this gets into the mobile supply chain, it
eventually trickles down to less-expensive, lower-end devices along
with dedicated, highly efficient chipsets, says Joey Pritikin,
founder and co-chief executive of biometrics company Tascent.
Facial recognition is likely one day to appear in camera-enabled
smart doorbells and locks, as well as in smart speakers like
Amazon's camera-equipped Echo Show, where personalization would be
a benefit: If it knew it was you, it might offer the latest "Game
of Thrones" episode; if, instead, it spotted your child, there's
"Sesame Street." Qualcomm already has customers in its Spectra
pipeline working on nonphone products, including internet-connected
cameras, says Mr. Choudhury.
Like all new technologies, facial recognition is likely to come
with trade-offs. In many contexts, a fingerprint scan may be less
obtrusive. The facial algorithms can be stymied by the presence or
absence of glasses, especially sunglasses. The annoyance of having
to take off your winter gloves to unlock your phone might be
replaced by the annoyance of having to re-enroll your face if your
facial hair changed.
All biometrics have their trade-offs -- your irises may be even
more unique than your face, but to scan them you have to bring the
phone close to your eye. And since an iris lacks contour, it can
still be spoofed by a still image. If you fail the facial scan, or
if you're wearing something that covers your face, you'll have to
punch in a code instead.
"The interesting thing about face recognition is that it has the
ability to be much more ubiquitous than fingerprint scanning
because camera sensors are that much easier to deploy," Mr.
Pritikin says. "I think it's just a matter of time before our daily
routine will reflect a number of seamless biometric
authentications."
Since Apple's existing fingerprint sensor can already verify
payments in stores via Apple Pay, it makes sense that Apple's
phones could also enable payments through face recognition in the
future.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about all this facial
recognition is how mundane it has the potential to become, and
fast. As a security measure that requires us only to look at our
device, it's easily taken for granted.
That is a good thing. Facial recognition has the potential to
make higher levels of security -- so-called multifactor
authentication -- so convenient that we no longer engage in all the
bad habits that put our finances and online lives at risk. That
isn't to say these systems won't be compromised somehow, but at
least for the short term, smiling at your phone every morning will
be far safer than punching in the same password over and over.
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 20, 2017 06:14 ET (10:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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