Your face becomes your ID for ambient retail and Artificial Intelligence

In September, for its latest iPhone (iPhone X), Apple abandoned its fingerprint sensor in favour of « Face ID », a facial recognition technology.

A few days later, it was Facebook who announced it was working on the possibility of unlocking an account with one’s face.

In the same months, KFC in collaboration with Alipay (Alibaba’s digital wallet) launched payment by facial recognition in a fast food outlet in China.

This September marks the emergence of facial recognition and simply confirms that artificial intelligence is spreading throughout our everyday existence.

In recent years, the Net giants have bought out numerous
start-ups specialized in facial recognition (Emotient is behind the Apple’s Face ID technology).

These takeovers have resulted in new services like Amazon Rekognition, which uses neural network models (machine learning) to detect and label thousands of objects and scenes in your images, and which also offers facial recognition functions.

These facial recognition technologies are capable of mapping 30,000 control points, the mapping then being sent to the processor for analysis. The processor reconstructs a virtual 3D model of your face, which ensures that users do not try and steal an account simply with a photograph.

In China this technology already features prominently in the smart cities : it can identify citizens and vehicles in real time, to anticipate and improve areas of heavy traffic. The country has provided the industry’s experts a huge database of images taken from citizens’ passport photos. The Chinese authorities are also using facial recognition in combination with different networks of connected cameras throughout the city that can track anyone at any time.

Less anxiety-provoking, Topology Eyewear is an augmented reality application providing customized glasses based on a 3D analysis of your face that adapts the size of the glasses to fit you.

Finally, in the short term one can easily imagine this technology being integrated into existing voice assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple‘s HomePod. An idea that could facilitate identification and thereby promote customized and secure service such as bank transfers, purchases of goods and services (obviously one thinks of Amazon Echo, which accesses the marketplace but also one’s Capital One bank account).

Authentication, simplification, security, all the ingredients are coming together to place the consumer at the centre of a galaxy of services guaranteed by Apple, Amazon, Google, Alibaba and Tencent, pending the awakening of the Old World.

Authentification, simplification, sécurisation tous les ingrédients se mettent en place pour placer le consommateur au milieu d’une galaxie de services dont les garants sont Apple, Amazon, Google, Alibaba et Tencent en attendant le réveil du vieux monde.