BioID liveness detection to be used in Bavarian social robot study

BioID‘s biometric liveness detection technology will be used to enhance the social capabilities of “humanoid” social robots for a study led by the FORSocialRobots research network. The network will analyze six applications of the technology in relevant social fields — monitoring, logistics, production, service, retirement homes, and dementia centers.

The goal of the study is to extract and structure social skills and transfer them to different robots operating in different scenarios.

Liveness detection will be used to enable systems to recognize if a real person or a recaptured representation of a person is in front of them. BioID’s API distinguishes images or motion mimicked by photos and videos from real faces. It can block masks, avatars, deepfakes, and other spoofing attempts by analyzing two selfies taken by any standard camera. This will help ensure that the robot only assists actual people.

To achieve this, researchers will extract the necessary social skills between humans and machines, structure them as machine-readable, and then use AI tools to represent them. They will then research the social skills for situational and empathetic communication as well as adaptive and proactive interaction before making them available in the form of “microservices,” so that they can be used in a technical system.

The skills will then be simulated in a virtual environment to check functionality and evaluate them safely with “test persons.”

The study is scheduled to begin on January 1, 2024 and will run for three years. The network is funded by a grant of roughly 1,980,000 euros (roughly US$2,173,525) from the Bavarian Research Foundation.

FORSocialRobots is competing with another research group funded by the foundation, FORNeRo, which focuses on the ergonomic integration of robotics in clinical workflow settings. Together, these two groups and seven other technology projects will receive a combined 8.5 million euros (roughly US$9,329,898).

“Turning innovative research approaches into concrete applications for entrepreneurial and social practice is entirely in line with our high-tech agenda of the Bavarian state government,” says Minister of Economics Hubert Aiwanger, the recently appointed deputy chairman of the foundation council, in a release.

Article Topics

BioID  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  research and development  |  robots