Korean ATMs Exploring Face Rec Options

According to JoongAng Daily, one of three English-language daily newspapers in South Korea, the Korean National Police Agency is currently looking into new facial recognition technologies as part of a comprehensive public security plan to reduce crimes in the country.

Bank machines have been involved in several notable crimes in South Korea, including the highly-publicized murders by confessed serial killer Kang Ho-sun earlier this year. In those murders, an ATM was used to withdraw money from the victims' bank accounts before they were kidnapped and killed.

In the JoongAng Daily article discussing new attempts to further secure the nation's ATMs, the author discusses concerns around the implementation of facial recognition technologies, including problems with complicated instructions, cost and the technical headaches often involved:

"But ATMs with such advanced features still come with a litany of problems. Facial recognition machines were once test-run by several banks in 2005. Users were confused by a string of instructions such as "Raise your head, please" or "Step up to the machine, please," before being able to access their accounts. The disabled had even more trouble."

All of these arguments point to an interesting issue, and ultimately the resounding truth that facial recognition should not be implemented solely in the manner criticized above. Instead, government agencies should focus on using face finding technologies to help police procure better evidence, while also implementing face searching technologies in order to help track down and identify suspects.

Using these technologies, alerts can still be generated if someone with a mask or disguise attempts to use an ATM, but that notice would go directly to a monitoring center for evaluation, rather than immediately freezing all activity on the machine. As we know, when you adversely affect a customer's experience too much they become upset, and when too many people become upset the offending technology must be removed -- in this case, the removal wouldn't help anyone, and thus the complete freezing of ATM machines should be uniformly avoided.

3VR has created its own technology to address this problem by combining face finding, face matching and face searching. It is this synthesis of capabilities that ultimately makes the technology effective and leads to the best, least intrusive and most efficient results for all users -- from the smallest businesses looking to manage access control for a single door to multifaceted government agencies and airports.

India Bank Gets ATM Biometrics

From Rupee Times:

SBI Chief General Manager of Gujarat H C Pattnaik said, "The orders for biometric ATM's have been placed and we expect to install 150 such machines initially in important districts and talukas of the state by March end this year."

With identity theft and other forms of financial fraud on the rise, I expect to be seeing announcements like this more and more. Finger print verification is one way to go. Another is to use facial recognition to do the same thing. That approach has the benefit of being generally viewed as less intrusive from a privacy standpoint, and since it also requires banks to invest in the quality of their ATM cameras, it would also enhance a banks general surveillance capabilities.