Method Computer Program and System for Facial Recognition : European Patent Application 17154640.1

Facial recognition is used in a wide range of applications, which include access control, identification systems, surveillance, and identity verification. A partic­ular application is the role of facial recognition in the au­thentication of identification documents (IDs), i.e. the process of analysing an ID in order to prove its legitimacy or otherwise. Millions of IDs are manually examined by human operators every day in different businesses and organisations. There is a growing need for automatic or semi-automatic methods for authenticating IDs. One method of automatic electronic validation of IDs uses fa-cial recognition to compare a scanned image of the face printed on the ID with the image of the face stored in the ID's biometric chip. This validation check aims to reduce one common technique of forgery of IDs namely image substitution. Problems exist with this validation method, for exam pie the presence of watermarks, holograms, re­flections and other imperfections on the scanned image presents difficulties in analysis. The invention seeks to improve facial recognition methods, which can then be applied to the validation of IDs.