TrueFace.AI busts facial recognition imposters
Facial recognition technology is more prevalent than ever before. It's being used to identify people in airports, put a stop to child sex trafficking, and shame jaywalkers.
But the technology isn't perfect. One major flaw: It sometimes can't tell the difference between a living person's face and a photo of that person held up in front of a scanner.
TrueFace.AI facial recognition is trying to fix that flaw. Launched on Product Hunt in June, it's meant to detect "picture attacks."
The company originally created Chui in 2014 to work with customized smart homes. Then they realized clients were using it more for security purposes, and TrueFace.AI was born.
Shaun Moore, one of the creators of TrueFace.AI, gave us some more insight into the technology.
"We saw an opportunity to expand our reach further and support use cases from ATM identity verification to access control for data centers," said Moore. "The only way we could reach scale across industries would be by stripping out the core tech and building a platform that allows anyone to use the technology we developed."
"We knew we had to focus on spoof detection and how we could lower false positives."
TrueFace.AI can detect when a face or multiple faces are present in a frame and get 68 raw points for facial recognition. But its more unique feature is spoof detection, which can tell real faces from photos.
"While working on our hardware, we tested and used every major facial recognition provider. We believe that doing that (testing every solution available) and applying facial recognition to a very hard use case, like access control and the smart home, allowed us to make a better, more applicable solution," said Moore. "All of these steps led us to understand how we could effectively deploy technology like ours in a commercial environment."
They made their final product by using deep learning. They trained classifiers with thousands of attack examples they collected over the years, and liked the results.
A "freemium" package is available to encourage the development community that helped TrueFace.AI come up with a solution. Beyond that, the Startup Package is $99 per month while the Scale Package is $199 per month. An Enterprise Plan is available via a custom agreement with TrueFace.AI.
While Moore couldn't divulge exactly which companies are using the technology, he did say some of them are in the banking, telecommunications, and health care industries.
It's a service that could become increasingly valuable as companies turn to facial recognition technology.
Molly is a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While there, she studied life sciences communication and conservation biology. Molly has worked in multiple communications positions at UW and recently acted as a science intern at Business Insider in NYC. She is a lover of all things science and tech related, and is always ready to take on a new challenge. When Molly isn't writing, she fills her time training for IRONMAN events, acting as the unofficial #1 Wisconsin athletics fan, and trying as many new foods as her budget will allow.
