RFID Hybrid Tech: Tetragate Biometric Facial Recognition

RFID Lowdown
Posted: Sep 28, 2006

American Barcode & RFID has jointly produced a new technology called TETRAGATE which performs facial recognition. The press release makes it seem like something out of a Philip K. Dick-based movie, such as Minority Report or Paycheck, maybe even Blade Runner. Biometric identification has been a growing security niche for quite some time, but only in the past couple of years have biometrics and RFID been combined into security solutions.

Tetragate's solution stores employee biometrics on their smart ID card (using an UHF RFID tag) and compares that with a facial scan on the spot. Apparently, the technology can not only recognize people from a distance of 60 feet - i.e., without people knowing - it can scan 60,000 faces in one second.

I'm speechless. Or at least I was for about 2 minutes after reading this. I've never heard of a solution this fast before. It's the result of several well-known companies, including Symbol Technologies (who Motorola plans to buy out), Fulcrum Biometrics, Zebra Technologies, American Barcode & RFID, and more.

But despite demonstrations of such technology in such TV shows as Las Vegas, I don't have a lot of faith in facial recognition as a reliable biometrics scheme. Faces can change; only eyes don't. I've recognized people I hadn't seen in 10 years or more by their eyes and/or voice, not necessarily their face. And if you've ever seen pictures of any single woman with different hair colours and styles, a partially-obscured face couldn't possibly be recognized with any accuracy.

On the other hand, this solution works on the principle that the person carrying a smart id card is who they say they are, with the facial scan to prove it. If the scan and the biometric info do not match, a "security situation" is triggered. From that point of view, my doubt is irrelevant. This system is then sufficient for its purposes. And if it is using a neural net - as I suspect it must be - then it will "learn" over time, improving on its efficiency. Hence, there may be a lot of security exceptions initially, as the system gets to "know" an employee.

Whether Tetragate is sufficient for airports or borders remains to be seen, though given its apparent speed and power, it might just work, combined with the PASS smart ID card, for the Canada-US border crossing on the bridges.