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Should Homer Simpson ever try to smuggle his unqualified identical twin brother into work in his stead, a new biometric identification system that will be used to secure nuclear plants is sure to prompt a “D’oh!” or seven.

The technology, which comes from a Japanese firm called Sagawa Advance, is sufficiently accurate to be able to tell identical twins apart – a massive advance on current technologies, which famously can’t tell Jessica Alba from a plank of wood. Oh, wait…

Anyway, Sagawa’s thing uses an infrared scanner to analyse 40,000 data points on a face before comparing the details against a database of people it already knows. If there’s no match then access to power plants, medical factories and other sensitive areas is easily denied.

Sagawa plans to sell the scanner and database computer set for ¥6 million ($60,000) later this year, with a view to shifting 40 units in its first twelve months.

(Crossposted to TechRadar)

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• If this face recognition system is so specific that it can tell identical twins apart, then one has to expect it to exhibit a high false reject rate.  There is an inevitable trade-off in biometrics between false accepts (sensitivity) and false rejects (specificity).  When examining the claim of biometrics researchers and vendors, remember it’s a fact of life that ‘there is good news and there is bad news’!

  So in this case, has the manufacturer specified both a FRR and a FAR?  And what about the processing time taken to reach a decision?

  These sorts of extremely specific systems might be good for securing access to data centres and missile silos but for broader population deployment, such as in immigration control let alone ATMs, getting the right balance between FAR (security) and FRR (customer convenience) is very tricky.

  Cheers,

  Stephen Wilson,
  Lockstep.

  Posted by Stephen Wilson on 08/05/15 at 09:54 AM