While modern face recognition systems are unable to view people in places with poor lighting or in darkness, German researchers have developed new technology based on a person's thermal signature instead of relying on traditional methods,
according to RT, a Russian state-funded television network.
The new technology, which can recognize faces in just 35 milliseconds, is still in its beginning stages but significantly surpasses existing systems and "improves the state-of-the-art by more than 10 percent," researchers Saquib Sarfraz and Rainer Stiefelhagen told the MIT Technology Review.
According to RT, current face recognition systems are based on matching clean and well-lit photos taken in broad light, posing an issue for law enforcement and security services when objects are in the shade.
The two computer scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany created a system that analyzes infrared images and matches them with the ordinary photos, RT notes.
As the new technology is still evolving, the accuracy is only about 80 percent when the system has many visible light images in its database to compare to the thermal image, but the accuracy drops to 55 percent when only one visible image is available.
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