News

Facial recognition coming to ATMs

May 3, 2010

Using credit or debit cards to withdraw cash from an ATM may become a thing of the past with the introduction of facial recognition technology.

According toan article in The Daily Nation, the Basic Intelligent Automated Teller Machine is on display at Kenya's national scientific conference in Nairobi. The device is being developed by Dr. Waweru Mwangi, the director of the Institute of Computer Science and Information Technology at Jomo Kenyatta University. He hopes to have a prototype ready for testing in six months.

The ATM comes with a camera that sends details of a customer's facial dimensions to a database for verification. Once the image is verified, the customer either enters a PIN or answers a personal security question. A thief could not use a photograph to trick the machine because the machine uses length, width and depth to recognize the image.