How Facial Recognition Software is the first step towards advanced AI development?
December 23, 2024
To start off on understanding how advanced AI stems from the basic facial recognition software that we all have used at some point, we have to understand what facial recognition fully entails, and more importantly, what it means and how it works. In simple words, facial recognition is the software that recognizes your facial features through your camera on either a phone, tablet, laptop or any device with an advanced camera. It has been quite commonly used to detect faces in cameras, used for tracking purposes in government services and even used on social media websites such as Facebook to help you tag your friends or identify other people in your friends’ photos. Facial recognition has advanced in its own form over the years, now being used by Apple as a means through which a person may unlock their phones or make purchases and pay bills.
Facial recognition has also advanced to the point of being used for AI recognition purposes. By this, we mean the technological advancements being made to the world of Artificial Intelligence that are being incorporated into almost every sector of the tech industry. Most advanced, modern technology has incorporated some form of AI into their trade of work to propel the development of their work as well as the industry itself. The way this incorporates facial recognition is through several new advancements in the tech industry.
Augmented Reality
This is a software that has probably been used by you without you even realizing. This type of AI reality has to do with your immediate surroundings, as well as recognition of your facial features. Most famously, Augmented Reality
is used through social media from Snapchat and Instagram through ‘filters’ that automatically detect your facial features and change your appearance. It was also used for the popular game ‘Pokémon Go’ which was used by players to detect their surroundings and provide locations of Pokémon that can be collected through a virtual map. AI is needed for this to detect your facial features, as not everyone has similar features and have space between their eyes or different eye shapes and lips, noses, teeth etc. AI is also needed to detect the spaces around you and absorb your surroundings to enhance the effects of the filters or the games.
Healthcare, Security and other purposes
AI is fed billions of photographs and processed with thousands of algorithms which it processes and develops further at its own pace and understanding. For healthcare and security purposes, it is also fed with billions of visual signs of what to detect in social settings to make assessments on human behavior. AI can potentially detect security threats at popular avenues like airports and assess the symptoms in a person for common illnesses. Most recently, at the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, AI was used for facial recognition purposes to detect if a person has fever with a virtual mirror device that was used by many countries at popular venues and for big events.