The Latest News, Views, and Insights from Kairos

The research of facial recognition has been a fascinating journey. It began in the 1960s with Woody Bledsoe, Helen Chan Wolf, and Charles Bisson who created programs to assist with basic face recognition. They were not fully automated back then, requiring the administrator to locate the key facial features such as the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth on the image being examined. The programs calculated distances and ratios to a common reference point which was then compared to set reference data.

Since those early days, many facial recognition research groups have examined various aspects of facial detections and recognition. By the 1970s Goldstein, Harmon, and Lesk were able to automate the recognition process by using 21 specific subjective markers, such as hair color and lip thickness.

Kirby and Sirovich's research in the late 1980s gave another leap forward to the nascent technology, by determining that less than one hundred values were required to accurately code a suitable aligned and normalized face.

I have found 56 locations where facial recognition research groups have been the vanguard of 21st-century research into facial analysis. Some of this research is now historic, although still freely available on the internet. In other cases, the research is ongoing, with capabilities and techniques being improved on all the time. Some of the research is very clearly focused on facial research. Some of the other studies have only a peripheral connection to the subject.

I have tried to include all facial recognition research groups whose work appears on the internet. If you know of a group that is missing from this article feel free to contact us at Kairos and I am happy to update this post.

The biggest news in the facial recognition industry this month has been the walkout from the ongoing facial recognition privacy talks by the nine consumer/privacy representatives. While the media has widely reported the walkout, as in this New York Times article, often quoting from the privacy advocates' press statements, there has been little public comment from members of the facial recognition industry. As a strong supporter of these talks, we at Kairos would like to share our viewpoint.

It may surprise people to know that although Kairos is still a relatively young company, it has not always focused on providing facial recognition software. In its early days, Kairos was best known for its flagship app, TimeClock.

As its name suggests, Kairos designed TimeClock to clock employees in, who are paid on an hourly basis. The TimeClock app used facial recognition technology to enable employees to clock in, to eliminate the risk of “buddy punching", which is when people clock in on for their coworkers for time when they did not actually work.

You prick up your ears at the word "analytics".

It's something of a buzzword at the moment. Google Analytics, Moz Analytics, Pinterest Analytics, Twitter Analytics ... the lists of data that analyze our online lives goes on.

If you are a marketer, I am sure that you regularly use a wide selection of valuable analytics reports to determine the successes and failures of your online campaigns.

And the developers among you, just about to click away from this post, at the mere mention of the word “marketing”, do you know analytics can help you too? Imagine the potential you have to create apps that collect and provide valuable analytics reports that your users truly love.

Look at a typical fast food restaurant or cafe. Somewhere behind the counter there will be a menu displayed. In the worst cases, these might be a very amateur list, sometimes even handwritten. Usually, there will be sign written boards. They are drab, tedious, and functional. They show what customers can buy and what the prices are - in the worse cases they prices have been crossed out and new prices written beside the old.

What sort of marketing is this? What kind of image does this give the customer of the business looking for a place to eat?

Slightly more upmarket places, use backlit displays to give their signage a more professional look. They at least replace the actual sign panels every so often, when they want to promote new menu items or change their prices. But they are still boring marketing. They are totally static, with no dynamism.

More recently technology has helped the humble menu board. Digital menu boards offer exciting new ways to target your customers and provide adaptable signs that change to meet their needs.