

And of course, if you have ever used your thumbprint to unlock a phone that phone has a built-in biometric authentication system, which uses the fingerprint. If you’ve ever seen a movie where the spy needs to perform a rental scan to unlock a door, that’s a biometric authentication system. Biometric refers to statistical data from a biological system that can be recognized verified. The possessor of the key is allowed to gain access to whatever it unlocks. Even the humble centuries-old house key is a rudimentary authentication system. Every online account you have has an authentication system known as a password.

Your credit card has an authentication system known as a chip and pin. An “authentication system” simply means the technology involved in the method used to verify a particular person can gain access to something. That’s quite a mouthful, right? So let’s unpack it. Please let us know your findings either in the comments below or on the API profile.Face ID is Apple’s modern biometric authentication system. We would be interested to hear if you have used the alpha API, are trying out the Beta API or have any thoughts about uses for this service. How about giving your local café the permission to auto-check you in on foursquare whenever their security camera sees you enter? While the website and Documentation consistently mention "photos," it would be interesting to consider things such as analyzing video capture stills for almost real-time facial recognition. have developed Facebook applications including Phototagger and Photofinder (in Alpha) and the technology is in use by EyeBuyDirect, AXE (Lynx in the UK) and Ralph Lauren. The service also boasts features such as grouping of similar faces, bulk-tagging, Integration with Facebook (recognize Facebook friends in photos on Facebook Connect apps) and Twitter integration (search and tag Twitter faces across photo services). In Beta the API limit will be upped significantly to a 5,000 photos per-hour limit. The API has already been used by 10,000 developers during alpha testing, where there was a restriction of scanning 200 photos per-hour. This now changes as is offering a free to use face recognition API for photos. These are big companies with big money to spend. This software hasn't seemed accessible at all with only applications such as Google Picasa, Apple's iPhoto, Facebook and more recently XBox Kinect being the most obvious examples where it has been used. One such complex operation is that of facial recognition. Thanks to virtualization and a many other cloud features, we've seen these complex operations offered as services at a fraction of the cost. Paying for expensive licenses can mean an alternative solution has to be sought or worse still, a feature won't be developed at all.

Access to software that performs complex operations has been, and can still be, costly.
