HR teams and workplaces are increasingly adopting latest technological advances in artificial intelligence and machine vision. One popular use case that is being rapidly adopted is face recognition based employee attendance. This article is meant to educate HR and admin teams on the endless possibilities of using face recognition.

What is facial recognition?

Face recognition is a way of identifying and confirming a person’s identity through his/her face. Faces are identified from a range of photos or videos in real-time and compared with existing database of photos to find the most accurate match. Face recognition technology has improved leaps and bounds in the last 5 years both in terms of speed and accuracy.

How does facial recognition technology work?

People are familiar with facial recognition technology as it is being used by the likes of Facebook, Apple etc. Its now common to unlock your Apple phones by just pointing to your face.

Facial recognition works by identifying broad features on a face, relative positioning of the eyes, nose, jawline etc and creates a unique spatial mapping of a face. This mapping is robust enough to handle minor modifications to the face such as growing a beard, putting on makeup etc. Common identifiers used in current facial recognition algorithms include distance between eyes, distance from forehead to chin, depth of eye sockets, contours of lips, ears, chin etc.

Unless there is a very large similarity in face (eg. very close twins), facial recognition technology rapidly identifies a face with high degree of accuracy. To give you an idea of speed, turnaround time for identifying a face from a database of 3000 faces is less than 1 second.

Why is facial recognition based attendance getting popular?

While facial recognition has many applications across industries, one of the most popular use-case for face recognition technology is to mark attendance of employees and manage visitors, contract workers and other temporary staff. Few reasons why face recognition is better than RFID tags or biometric devices:

1. It always works: Unlike a RFID based attendance system where you can forget to carry a card some days, face recognition based systems just need your presence to mark attendance. It is much more seamless employees for employees, HR and admin staff.
2. Completely contactless: In the post Covid world, safety has become a primary concern. Biometric devices or RFID tags need contact and hence have a risk of spreading infections. Face recognition technology is completely contactless and safe for employees
3. Complete Audit trail: RFID based access cards are prone to misuse. People can use other’s cards to mark proxy attendance. Face recognition based systems capture a snapshot of a person and a timestamped record is always available for scrutiny at a later date.

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