Will face mapping still recognise you if your features change?
When it comes to proving your identity online, Face ID—also known as facial biometrics—is fast becoming one of the most reliable methods of authentication. Why? Because your unique facial features are the most reliable indicator of what makes you, you. When used in conjunction with “liveness” technology—a process that verifies a person’s realness and confirms they are using their face to log in at that moment in time—this technology offers powerful protection against potential fraudsters and cybercriminals. But what happens when our appearance changes with age, or we undergo a rhinoplasty or lip fillers? Could changes to our face cause our own Face ID tools to lock us out?
Appearance changes and face recognition
The good news is that the natural process of aging doesn’t have a significant effect on face identification — to a point. In 2017, Michigan State University investigated the extent to which facial aging affects the performance of facial recognition systems. The study found that 99 percent of facial recognition images could still be recognized up to six years later. However, the face does change naturally over time, and the accuracy began to drop when images of a person were taken more than six years apart. This, of course, varies from person to person.
iiDENTIFii tech solution
COO of iiDENTIFii, an award-winning remote biometric identification platform, Murray Collyer, says, “Our technology asks users to take a selfie from a specific angle. This confirms that a real, live person is trying to log into the account and that a fraudster is not using a photo of your face to try log in. We confirm the person’s identity by cross-referencing it with existing official identity records, such as a person’s government-issued ID. This means that, even if your face changes as, you age, you will still be successfully identified if your official ID documents are reasonably up to date.” As the research explains, ‘reasonable’ is usually within the past six years.