Should Facial Recognition be Used to Identify Individuals with Coronavirus?

Coronavirus pandemic inflates around the world wrapping millions of people. This proved to be a great risk for many of the enterprises except for facial recognition. These technologies are seeing COVID-19 as a business opportunity. Most of the facial recognition companies are trying to overcome the situation. The main risk that first arises is how we can detect the person or material that is being infected by coronavirus? Here the aim is to identify individuals with coronavirus without the risk of a person’s close contact.

Companies like DERMALOG in Germany and TELPO in China are pitching the updates as a safety feature. DERMALOG is a biometric company that produces iris, biometric and facial recognition hardware to determine the temperature. DERMALOG develops a solution for access to data security, authentication, and mobile security. While TELPO is launching the enhanced temperature sensing terminals with facial recognition. That terminals even work if the person is wearing a mask. In a press release, it is said that… 

This technology can not only reduce the risk of cross-infection but also improve traffic efficiency by more than 10 times, which will save time and reduce congestion. It is suitable for government, customs, airports, railway stations, enterprises, schools, communities, and other crowded public places.

The other source was to detect the patient through the fingerprint scanners. The problem was that people touch the same surface many times. The person having COVID-19 can infect other persons. Which could spread the infection? This gives a kickback to the manufacturers of fingerprint scanners. At the same time, it gives a quick boost to emerge for facial recognition technologies. Businesses in India are being directed from fingerprint authentication to facial recognition. Thai government uses this at the Border Control.

TELPO has achieved great accuracy in sensing at the distance of up-to 0.7M to reduce the close contact. That can realize the 24-hour temperature measurement. A real-time voice is generated, on founding abnormal body temperature. This helps companies to quickly select the employees having abnormal body temperature. A platform marketing specialist at Telpo wrote to OneZero in an email…

In the face of this outbreak, we have developed a solution for non-contact body temperature measurement plus face recognition to meet the rapid need to diagnose the patient and isolate and control the virus in time.

Crystal Chu

A GIKI student from Pakistan named Muhammad Aleem that his AI model can detect the Coronavirus with 96% accuracy. He used an AI-Based solution for detecting COVID-19 by using chest X-rays. He was passionate to apply the knowledge of his Computer Vision and Deep Learning. Aleem used X-ray images of COVID-19 positive to train the model. His neural network learned to make the right decisions having 85-90% accuracy in it.

Coronavirus Tips Infographic:

COVID-19 has urged the technology companies to market their facial recognition algorithms that work even if a person is wearing a mask or not. Companies like Hanvon and Herta has announced that their facial recognition still works even if a person is wearing a mask. Facial recognition is also used to check whether the people are following the rules or not. Baidu’s facial recognition can check whether the person is wearing a mask or not. As the mask is held to be mandatory for everyone in China. 

COVID-19 has given space to facial recognition technologies as an alternate to touch-based sensors. Facial recognition is not proved to be a perfect science as we have seen the issues of privacy and protections that stand up. We first need to ensure that privacy rights are protected. Data that is stored and managed is used for restricted purposes. People need to be aware that how their data will be used. If used by third parties or advertisers they can build a profile to target the audience. The same data can be used to track the individual’s behavior and their online presence. This could be done by scraping profiles from their social media accounts.

Facial recognition in combination with body temperature has proven to help detect the individual having Coronavirus. This technology aids in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and identify those who are suffering from fever. Many countries adopted this to check whether the citizens are following the local regulations or not. Great care must be taken by any organization in setting facial recognition at that time.