KDDI R&D Labs Develops Facial Authentication System For Cell Phones

According to Nikkei. net, KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc., the research arm of KDDI Corp., has developed a prototype of a system that verifies the owner of a cellular phone by analyzing the picture he takes of himself with the phone's built-in camera.

"The system is intended to prevent unauthorized access to private information on a person's phone.

With the system, the owner of a cell phone takes a self-portrait with thephone's built-in camera that gets registered in the phone. The phone isthen "locked," and the only way to access various functions is to take a picture to prove that it matches the registered one.

Facial authentication is a well-established technology used for security purposes in places like buildings, but it poses unique challenges when used in a phone because the ambient lighting around the user is always different, making the verification difficult to achieve within the practical limits of error.

The system currently has an accuracy level that ranges from 63% to 76%, depending on the way the face is lit when the photo is taken. For practical purposes, the accuracy needs to be boosted to 95%, a level KDDI R&D Laboratories hopes to achieve in one to two years. (The Nikkei Business Daily Friday edition)

photo from dottocomu

Related:

-- Omron Produces Face Recognition for Mobile Phones - OMRON has announced face recognition technology which can be implemented in PDAs, mobile phones or other mobile devices with a camera function, dubbed the "OKAO Vision Face Recognition Sensor."

And on a lighter note:

-- Mobile Phone Reads Your Face, Predicts the Future - Zenitum Entertainment Computing, a Seoul based startup, announced Wednesday its new mobile entertainment service called “Mobile Face Reading” available on SK Telecom.

-- Mobile Psychic Photos Show Occult World - Zenitum Entertainment Computing, a Korean start-up developing image-recognition technology, is launching a mobile psychic photo service with SK Telecom this Thursday.

-- Match your face with a celeb - Swedish company, Softhouse, has come with a fun application where you can send a picture to their server by MMS and it then uses facial recognition to match your face with a celebrity".

emily | 10:29 AM | How people and businesses are using cameraphones |
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