UWE Bristol, Customer Clever to develop 3-D facial recognition system

The University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) has partnered with British facial recognition firm Customer Clever to develop a 3-D facial recognition system for high security commercial applications, according to a report in Phys.org.

Customer Clever is already successfully providing its line of face recognition solutions — CleverIntel, CleverID, CleverAccess and CleverPod — for customers in a range of sectors, including retail.

Innovate UK has allocated joint funding of £170,000 (US$217,657) for the two-year project in an effort to drive innovation and creative thinking in the quickly growing sector.

Overseeing the project will be experts from UWE Bristol’s Centre for Machine Vision, which has been developing 3-D facial recognition systems for more than a decade.

“This funding is for us to go ahead and commercially implement the technology. We think it’s on the verge of becoming really big,” Lyndon Smith, Professor of Computer Simulation and Machine Vision at the Centre for Machine Vision, part of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, said.

Professor Smith said his team’s high-resolution 3-D technology is significantly better than the 2-D face recognition systems that are currently available, which are typically used for security purposes in airports.

He added that the 3-D facial recognition technology is more discreet than iris recognition and fingerprinting systems.

“Current available 2-D systems may be fooled into incorrect identification whereas our 3-D solution provides pinpoint accuracy mapping your face down to skin texture levels,” Smith said. “For national or high security, border control and locations where access control is paramount, our 3-D solution provides an extra layer of confidence not available in many of the 2-D solutions.

“Our system produces what is effectively a fingerprint of the face – showing up fine detail and blemishes such as scars or wrinkles. The solution is quicker and more effective than fingerprint or iris recognition, which are more obtrusive to use.”

Article Topics

3D face recognition  |  biometrics  |  commercial applications  |  research and development