How facial recognition system control offers effective workplace security

By Hiren Bhandari

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit every industry, bringing businesses to a near halt. Almost two years into the global health crisis, we now know we have no choice but to live with the virus. While many of us continue to work from home, others have started returning to their workplaces, trying to follow safety protocols to the tee. From social distancing to frequent sanitisation, businesses are taking all possible steps to protect their employees and partners from infection.

But are these measures enough to ensure that everybody at the workplace is safe from the invisible enemy lurking in the air? While we might be doing the basics, more can surely be done to minimise, if not eliminate, the threat of infection. For example, contactless attendance management and controlling who has access to the floor can go a long way to create a safer workplace.

Fingerprint authentication is the most used biometric technology to record attendance, but touchless technology has become the need of the hour. Face recognition-based security for access control and workforce management can create a robust contactless identity verification system. Meanwhile, it also can solve looming challenges of future health risks that the companies will face once the employees return to work in larger numbers.

So, what exactly is facial recognition system?
As the term suggests, facial recognition means the identification of facial features. Like the system for reading fingerprints, facial recognition is a category of biometric security where the system authenticates the user’s face for verification.

How does facial recognition system work?
Unlike other systems like fingerprint or passcode identification, the facial recognition system uses unique shapes, patterns and positioning of the facial features in the process, which makes it one of the safest technologies. The system can differentiate between a face and the background. Every face has its own contours and distinguishable marks, and a facial recognition system reads the geometry of the face to convert it into biometric data. Here are the key factors that contribute to it:

– Distance from forehead to the chin
– Distance between the eyes
– Depth of the eye sockets
– Length of the jawlines
– Width of the nose

Even though the systems can vary, they all tend to follow some basic steps. First, a camera detects the face and captures an image. A software then analyses its geometry. The system then transforms the analog information into digital data that runs through a database of faces and identifies one.

How does it ensure security?
Moving forward, employers will move to make workplaces safer and hygienic to address health risks, and the face recognition system can be a savior. Not just will the touchless technology reduce the risk of infection, it will also be rapid and reliable as compared to other biometric recognition systems.

Facial recognition systems can give teeth to workplace security and integrate several processes into a single device, thereby enabling the employer to reduce the time and workforce used on routine tasks exponentially:

– Touchless access: Hygiene can be challenging to maintain if office entry systems continue to rely on keycards or fingerprint scanners as they involve physical contact with frequently touched surfaces. Face recognition-based control empowers employees to access the floor without touching anything.

– Physical security: While keycards can be stolen and passwords can be shared, a face can rarely be replicated. A facial recognition system creates a more robust barrier to prevent illegal entry or unauthorized access.

– Rapid processing: The process of face recognition only takes a moment. Therefore, long queues of visitors and employees in small areas can be avoided.

– Health monitoring: Once integrated with heat-mapping features, facial recognition technology can check employees for elevated body temperatures too. The surveillance data can also identify people in close contact with an infected person to implement quarantine procedures immediately. In addition, a facial recognition system can be built to spot and caution people without masks and ensure that those wearing one have their nose and mouth covered.

Tools like facial recognition are not just hassle-free, intelligent and fool proof, they can also enable the employers to safeguard employees against future viral outbreaks and embrace the new normal with peace of mind. Even though facial recognition technology has been rapidly gaining popularity over the past few years, isn’t this the perfect time to get rid of the fingerprint scanners and unhygienic plastic access cards?