US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to bring a facial recognition technology to recognise faces through face masks.
Asiya S
NIST digitally applied mask shapes to photos and tested the performance of face recognition algorithms developed before COVID appeared. Because real-world masks differ, the team came up with variants that included differences in shape, colour and nose coverage | credits: NIST
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to bring a facial recognition technology to recognise faces through face masks with a "promising level of accuracy". This technology can help the travellers not to uncover their mouths and noses during border checks.
The trial was organised by Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) as a part of an yearly Biometric Technology rally. Since 2018 the rally brings together experts, technology vendors and volunteers to test the challenges posed by the use of facial recognition technology in a variety of scenarios. This year due to COVID 19 pandemic, they focused on the ability of AI systems to collect and match images of individuals wearing an array of different face masks to deploy the technology in international airports around the country.
The trials were carried out as a 10-day process, with the help of 600 volunteers from 60 different countries. Volunteers were asked to present themselves both masked and unmasked and the AI system was able to identify 93% of unmasked individuals and an average of 77% of masked individuals.
"This isn't a perfect 100% solution", said Arun Vemury, Director of S&T's Biometric and Identity Technology Centre, "but it may reduce risks for many travellers as well as the frontline staffs working in airports who no longer have to ask all travellers to remove masks".
Facial recognition systems are currently used in certain airports of US by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as a part of the program Simplified Arrival to prevent imposters from illegally entering the country. According to CBP, more than 55 million travellers had gone through this process.
DHS said that the previous rallies had shown that biometric system can excel at rapidly processing high volumes of travellers using face recognition and the next step is to adapt the technology to recognise people wearing masks. The final result of this event is expected to come in the next few weeks.