Where do faces
VisionLabs , which specializes in facial recognition technology, in less than a year became one of the winners of the Web Ready contest ( GoTech since 2016), entered the list of 12 finalists of the Challenge UP !, program organized by Intel, Cisco and Deutsche Telekom AG, as well as attracted 350 million rubles investment venture fund Sistema Venture Capital.
Alexander Khanin, the company's CEO, talks about how facial recognition technologies are being implemented in the commercial sector, what the future holds for them and how those who fall into the lens relate to them, and also identifies solutions that can compete with them.
Everyone is used to the fact that face recognition technology is a purely public history aimed at ensuring security. But today the technology has been actively introduced in the commercial sector - its share in the general face recognition market is growing by 30% every year. Here, the effect of technology is noticeable every day - dozens of scammers who are ready to, for example, withdraw money in banks with false passports. Savings in the average bank is about 100 thousand dollars a month. In the field of security, the opposite is true; the issue of payback and return on investment is not paramount, the goals of introducing such technologies do not necessarily have a commercial effect.
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One of the main motives of the business is the relative cheapness of such technology and the benefits compared with other ways of working on customer loyalty and security. Among the areas where facial recognition is becoming popular, it is worth highlighting the banking sector and retail.
Banks are now number one in terms of technology consumption in monetary terms. For example, last year, according to the National Bureau of Credit Histories, 596 thousand loans with signs of fraud were recorded in banks. Face recognition helps in the fight against these cases, and also speeds up customer service. For example, technology is being introduced to confirm payments. Classic solutions with sms-confirmation are more expensive. Each sms on the client's phone with a password to confirm costs the bank a few dozen kopecks, while photography and data exchange are several times cheaper. Often, facial recognition is complemented with a fingerprint, which gives maximum accuracy and the inability to forge a person’s data.
In addition to banks, face recognition actively penetrates into retail. There are also several tasks here. The first is the fight against serial thieves. It is necessary to find out among the visitors of those who have already come across to stealing before. The second task is a qualitative increase in the effectiveness of the loyalty system. A huge number of people come to the store, but few employees remember who they are. Face recognition technology provides a tool that digitizes the incoming stream of customers, to understand who and how often returns to them, to allocate vip-clients. On the basis of all these data, loyalty programs and unique offers for visitors are formed, the workforce and consultants are analyzed, which allows you to create the most efficient schedule for them, ultimately, the technology makes it possible to create the product range that meets the demographic portrait of visitors.
Recently owners of car dealers began to pay attention to technology. Of course, mainly representatives of the premium segment. What is the benefit? Usually, when a client rents a car for maintenance, this is accompanied by a rather long and often unnecessary dialogue with the employee of the auto center. What happens with the introduction of technology? As soon as a customer enters a car dealership, the manager who services him receives all the necessary data - the make and model of the car, the time spent on maintenance, etc. The number of questions decreases, and the car owner himself feels at home, he believes that they know him by sight. Car dealership gets a serious tool in the struggle for customer loyalty, and, as we understand it, in the conditions of a declining car market, many car centers rely on the service.
If we imagine that I will photograph a person in Europe and tell him his name, he will be very unhappy with this fact and, most likely, will go to court. In Russia, everything is different. Yes, the older generation is conservative, but those who are under 30 years old and a little higher are quite loyal. I think the reason is as follows. Everyone is already accustomed to the selfie, the technology of the social network Facebook, which, according to personal photos, gives a lot of information, therefore the appearance of a new “chip” with face recognition causes a positive reaction. For example: "what a fancy bank, how cool that I am serviced here."
Recently, in one of the CIS countries, we conducted an experiment on customer service at a bank without a passport. 99% of visitors were ready to recognize themselves by face. For them it became a revelation, people were glad that in fact they did not need to provide any documents. They are required only de jure.
By the way, for such a positive attitude is to thank the large IT corporations. Social networks and popular mobile applications have helped smooth the attitude towards the development of our technology.
With the development of face recognition solutions, the issue of privacy of the data being processed is becoming ever more acute. With those who introduce technology, we agree that we will never be allowed to call a person by name. For example, in the retail client is recognized in an impersonal form, the store does not care what his name is, the task is different - to determine what to offer him at the moment. This is the concept of working with the commercial sector.
But the problem itself still exists. The legal framework in this regard is very seriously lagging behind the development of technology. I think that over the next 3-5 years, much will depend on whether they decide in Russia and other countries the question of giving legal recognition to the recognition results.
In the meantime, technologies are moving towards widening the range of possible working conditions. If before it was possible to recognize faces only frontally and plus or minus a small turn, now the angle has increased markedly. The client no longer has to strain and look directly into the camera, which, of course, affects his comfort. The next task to be solved is to preserve the quality of the database, with which you can compare the results. Today, without errors, millions of faces can be recognized in the bases, but by the end of this year we want to bring this figure to 10 million or more.
Where will technology go next? I see several new areas of its implementation.
The first is the mobile payment segment and biometric acquiring. Payment will be made without a bank card, when the confirmation of the transaction occurs with the help of a biometric factor.
The second segment is robotics and automation. For example, automatic payment terminals in retail, where a cashier is not needed. In robotics today it is believed that the robot is not able to recognize faces, already defective robot. For example, he must distinguish who approached him - the owner, who has more authority, or just a visitor to any exhibition. By the way, at the exhibition itself, it must determine whether this or that person approached him earlier.
The third area is the Internet of Things. Any sensor can have intelligence. For example, you open the refrigerator at 3 o'clock in the morning, and he will recognize your face and say that he will not open, since you yourself have set such timing for him.
The last question is competitors. Here we can distinguish two technologies. In some narrow cases, the competitor of facial recognition may be the identification of a venous palm pattern. This is a more or less contactless method, although it works in limited conditions. Where? For example, an ATM. In some cases, it will be even more beneficial than recognizing the client by face. But while the degree of penetration of technology is low, and the databases (palm scans) are negligible compared to photos.
The second competitor is the phone ID. For example, a GSM signal can detect the presence of a person in a store. This solution will work more accurately than face recognition. But there is a problem. And this legislation and the concept of communication secrets. It is necessary to collect a steady bundle of information (who owns the phone), which is quite problematic at this stage. Technologically, this can be done, but not yet legally.
Generally, if we talk about the degree of development of recognition technologies, then every year scientists report that the quality gets better and the number of errors decreases, although they still exist and are quite large. From a technological point of view, it is already clear what remains to be done. I think that in the next 1.5-2 years the problem of face recognition will be completely solved. Therefore, we are looking not so much at the development of technology as at how it is necessary to solve the problem. There is a struggle for the speed of capture of the market, for the volume of databases and for working business models. And, of course, one cannot escape anywhere without the development of legislation. Now it lags behind the level of technology for many years. And not only in Russia.
Alexander Khanin, the company's CEO, talks about how facial recognition technologies are being implemented in the commercial sector, what the future holds for them and how those who fall into the lens relate to them, and also identifies solutions that can compete with them.
Everyone is used to the fact that face recognition technology is a purely public history aimed at ensuring security. But today the technology has been actively introduced in the commercial sector - its share in the general face recognition market is growing by 30% every year. Here, the effect of technology is noticeable every day - dozens of scammers who are ready to, for example, withdraw money in banks with false passports. Savings in the average bank is about 100 thousand dollars a month. In the field of security, the opposite is true; the issue of payback and return on investment is not paramount, the goals of introducing such technologies do not necessarily have a commercial effect.
')
Banks, retail and car dealers
One of the main motives of the business is the relative cheapness of such technology and the benefits compared with other ways of working on customer loyalty and security. Among the areas where facial recognition is becoming popular, it is worth highlighting the banking sector and retail.
Banks are now number one in terms of technology consumption in monetary terms. For example, last year, according to the National Bureau of Credit Histories, 596 thousand loans with signs of fraud were recorded in banks. Face recognition helps in the fight against these cases, and also speeds up customer service. For example, technology is being introduced to confirm payments. Classic solutions with sms-confirmation are more expensive. Each sms on the client's phone with a password to confirm costs the bank a few dozen kopecks, while photography and data exchange are several times cheaper. Often, facial recognition is complemented with a fingerprint, which gives maximum accuracy and the inability to forge a person’s data.
In addition to banks, face recognition actively penetrates into retail. There are also several tasks here. The first is the fight against serial thieves. It is necessary to find out among the visitors of those who have already come across to stealing before. The second task is a qualitative increase in the effectiveness of the loyalty system. A huge number of people come to the store, but few employees remember who they are. Face recognition technology provides a tool that digitizes the incoming stream of customers, to understand who and how often returns to them, to allocate vip-clients. On the basis of all these data, loyalty programs and unique offers for visitors are formed, the workforce and consultants are analyzed, which allows you to create the most efficient schedule for them, ultimately, the technology makes it possible to create the product range that meets the demographic portrait of visitors.
Recently owners of car dealers began to pay attention to technology. Of course, mainly representatives of the premium segment. What is the benefit? Usually, when a client rents a car for maintenance, this is accompanied by a rather long and often unnecessary dialogue with the employee of the auto center. What happens with the introduction of technology? As soon as a customer enters a car dealership, the manager who services him receives all the necessary data - the make and model of the car, the time spent on maintenance, etc. The number of questions decreases, and the car owner himself feels at home, he believes that they know him by sight. Car dealership gets a serious tool in the struggle for customer loyalty, and, as we understand it, in the conditions of a declining car market, many car centers rely on the service.
Big Brother
If we imagine that I will photograph a person in Europe and tell him his name, he will be very unhappy with this fact and, most likely, will go to court. In Russia, everything is different. Yes, the older generation is conservative, but those who are under 30 years old and a little higher are quite loyal. I think the reason is as follows. Everyone is already accustomed to the selfie, the technology of the social network Facebook, which, according to personal photos, gives a lot of information, therefore the appearance of a new “chip” with face recognition causes a positive reaction. For example: "what a fancy bank, how cool that I am serviced here."
Recently, in one of the CIS countries, we conducted an experiment on customer service at a bank without a passport. 99% of visitors were ready to recognize themselves by face. For them it became a revelation, people were glad that in fact they did not need to provide any documents. They are required only de jure.
By the way, for such a positive attitude is to thank the large IT corporations. Social networks and popular mobile applications have helped smooth the attitude towards the development of our technology.
What is the future and who is the competitor?
With the development of face recognition solutions, the issue of privacy of the data being processed is becoming ever more acute. With those who introduce technology, we agree that we will never be allowed to call a person by name. For example, in the retail client is recognized in an impersonal form, the store does not care what his name is, the task is different - to determine what to offer him at the moment. This is the concept of working with the commercial sector.
But the problem itself still exists. The legal framework in this regard is very seriously lagging behind the development of technology. I think that over the next 3-5 years, much will depend on whether they decide in Russia and other countries the question of giving legal recognition to the recognition results.
In the meantime, technologies are moving towards widening the range of possible working conditions. If before it was possible to recognize faces only frontally and plus or minus a small turn, now the angle has increased markedly. The client no longer has to strain and look directly into the camera, which, of course, affects his comfort. The next task to be solved is to preserve the quality of the database, with which you can compare the results. Today, without errors, millions of faces can be recognized in the bases, but by the end of this year we want to bring this figure to 10 million or more.
Where will technology go next? I see several new areas of its implementation.
The first is the mobile payment segment and biometric acquiring. Payment will be made without a bank card, when the confirmation of the transaction occurs with the help of a biometric factor.
The second segment is robotics and automation. For example, automatic payment terminals in retail, where a cashier is not needed. In robotics today it is believed that the robot is not able to recognize faces, already defective robot. For example, he must distinguish who approached him - the owner, who has more authority, or just a visitor to any exhibition. By the way, at the exhibition itself, it must determine whether this or that person approached him earlier.
The third area is the Internet of Things. Any sensor can have intelligence. For example, you open the refrigerator at 3 o'clock in the morning, and he will recognize your face and say that he will not open, since you yourself have set such timing for him.
The last question is competitors. Here we can distinguish two technologies. In some narrow cases, the competitor of facial recognition may be the identification of a venous palm pattern. This is a more or less contactless method, although it works in limited conditions. Where? For example, an ATM. In some cases, it will be even more beneficial than recognizing the client by face. But while the degree of penetration of technology is low, and the databases (palm scans) are negligible compared to photos.
The second competitor is the phone ID. For example, a GSM signal can detect the presence of a person in a store. This solution will work more accurately than face recognition. But there is a problem. And this legislation and the concept of communication secrets. It is necessary to collect a steady bundle of information (who owns the phone), which is quite problematic at this stage. Technologically, this can be done, but not yet legally.
Where is the border?
Generally, if we talk about the degree of development of recognition technologies, then every year scientists report that the quality gets better and the number of errors decreases, although they still exist and are quite large. From a technological point of view, it is already clear what remains to be done. I think that in the next 1.5-2 years the problem of face recognition will be completely solved. Therefore, we are looking not so much at the development of technology as at how it is necessary to solve the problem. There is a struggle for the speed of capture of the market, for the volume of databases and for working business models. And, of course, one cannot escape anywhere without the development of legislation. Now it lags behind the level of technology for many years. And not only in Russia.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/311026/
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