BiometricsOntario casinos implement ground breaking facial recognition technology
Casinos in Ontario are introducing ground breaking facial recognition technology in May; in tests, the system has had a 91 percent success rate in identifying problematic gamblers; all gamblers will be required to have their faces digitally scanned and run through a database before entering; the technology includes sophisticated privacy guards to ensure privacy and identity protection; it will cost $3 to $5 million to implement and will scan more than fifty million people a year
The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation will roll out ground breaking new facial recognition technology in all of its twenty-seven gambling facilities in May.
The new system will require that everyone entering a casino have their face digitally scanned. The image will then be run through a database of more than 15,000 people to determine whether you are on the casino’s banned list.
The Toronto Star reports that in the testing phase, after lighting and camera locations were adjusted, the system had a 91 percent success rate for accurate identifications.
The image scanning technology examines bone structure and measures specific points of the face such as the distance between the mouth, nose, and eyes.
To ensure privacy, if there is no match in the database the image will be discarded, but if there is a match security will be notified.
The system protects privacy even further by including a biometric encryption algorithm to guarantee there is no connection between a person’s private information and the template of their face.
“If the data is stolen or falls into the wrong hands, it’s essentially useless … a scrambled template,” said Karl Martin, one of the developers of the privacy component. “Nothing like this exists for facial recognition.”
In approving the system, Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s privacy commissioner, said, “It’s the most privacy-protected system using biometric encryption in the world.”
Professor Kostas Plataniotis of the University of Toronto biometric engineers designed this privacy component which was added to a platform created by iView Systems, which specializes in security and surveillance.
The system will cost $3 to $5 million to implement and will be used to scan more than fifty million people a year entering gambling facilities in Ontario.
