Face Masks and Facial Recognition: How Will They Co-Exist in the Future?

 Looking back at the time, face masks seemed odd whenever you crossed at streets with someone wearing it. Today, it has become as important as any other body part. Not only this, but a lot of countries have regulated the law of wearing a mask at a public place.

While face masks perform their job, have you wondered about using the face recognition technology while wearing it or how will they co-exist? First of all, facial recognition refers to technology identifying a human’s face and characteristics, including the position of your eyes, nose, chin, etc.

Face recognition is mostly used on your phone to unlock the same, as the camera operates to compare your face with the recorded profile. The process is simple, and it instantly unlocks your phone.

As mentioned above, facial recognition calculates the position of your facial features. Anything that seems different will interfere with the process. Many dislike that they have to remove their face mask for facial recognition to unlock their phone. It is annoying, right?

Though the pandemic started in 2020, reports say that the discussions regarding the co-existence of face mask and facial recognition have been going around in the US for the past two years. The US National Institute of Standard and Technology carried a research project to assess facial recognition tech’s performance while wearing a mask. Also, a report was published that the technology suffers 50 percent of the time trying to recognize masked faces. Not only this, but some Algorithms failed even to locate the face when it was covered too much.

Unfortunately, there is no solution to the issue mentioned above; however, NIST addresses the same. One of the US companies is offering a mask with the user’s printed faces to unlock their phone without taking it off. Though, we’ll all agree that it’s not the permanent solution.

It’s not only the coronavirus pandemic that has given rise to face masks, but many people used to wear it to protect them from air pollution. Also, people used masks during the ‘Black lives Matter’ protest to hide their identity from the authorities.

It’s not just now, but face masks will become a huge part in the near future due to a lot of reasons, and facial recognition systems will have to adapt the same. Something must be done about the same.

Undoubtedly, many suppliers are working on its solution that claims to give reliable results, yet there is nothing that could go viral.

Ava Williams is a self-professed security expert; he has been making the people aware of the security threats. His passion is to write about Cybersecurity, cryptography, malware, social engineering, internet and new media. He writes for Mcafee products at mcafee.com/activate.

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