Christy Gren | Jun 25, 2014 | Comments 0
A newly proposed alternative focused around the psychology of face recognition, called ‘Facelock’, was announced recently by a group of UK researchers in the journal PeerJ.
Who doesn’t want an authentication system that only you can crack and nobody else can? Or an authentication system which you can never forget?
A newly proposed alternative focused around the psychology of face recognition, called ‘Facelock’, was announced recently by a group of UK researchers in the journal PeerJ. Facelock promises to make things easy for you and your authentication system problems!
David Garner of University of York says recognition with a particular face determines an individual’s capacity to recognize it over distinctive photos and accordingly a set of faces that are known just to a single individual could be utilized to make a customized ‘lock’. Access is then granted to any individual who shows recognition of the faces across images, and denied to any individual who does not.
To register with the systems, users choose a set of faces that are rwell-known to them, however are not so well known to other individuals. The researchers observed that it was shockingly simple to generate faces that have this property.
By joining faces from over a user’s domains of familiarity say, movies and sports the scientists could make a set of faces that were known to that user only. To know those faces is then the key to Facelock.
The “lock” comprises of an arrangement of face grids and every grid is built so one face is natural to the user, whilst all different faces are new. Verification can be done by simply touching the familiar face in each grid. For any legitimate user, this is an insignificant task, as the familiar sticks out from others images. However, an imposter looking at the same grid hits a problem, none of the faces will be visible. The system has several pros and cons. Unlike a password or PIN-based systems, a recognition based approach never obliges users to learn anything. Nor does it oblige them to name the faces in order to do the verification. The only requirement is to show which face looks similar.
Scientists from Glasgow and York Universities asked volunteers to name celebrities who they knew, but most people wouldn’t. The team then made up a grid of nine images, each showing one celebrity face and eight strangers. Volunteers, who were asked to spot the faces they knew, got all times right.
“Pretending to know a face that you do not know is like pretending to know a language that you do not know. It just doesn’t work,” said Rob Jenkins from Britain’s University of York. Psychological research has shown that familiarity with a face is practically impossible to lose and so along these lines the system is naturally strong. In the current study, users verified effortlessly much after a one-year interim. Conversely neglected passwords might be forgotten within days!
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