Three scientists from King Saud University (KSU), which is leading the vanguard in the Kingdom for academic excellence, have been granted a US patent on biometric security.
“KSU scientists Imran Razzaq, Khaled Alghathbar and Muhammad Khurram Khan earned the patent on their new invention titled “face recognition using multilayered discriminant analysis under patent number 9,355,303 in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO),” a media coordinator at KSU said.
They expressed gratitude to the KSU leadership and Intellectual Property and Technology Licensing Program (IPTL) for encouragement, support and assistance toward this major scientific breakthrough, he said.
This was created after research and development work at the Center of Excellence in Information Assurance (CoEIA) at KSU, and the results of the research were presented at an international conference in South Korea, while a paper was published in an ISI-indexed international journal.
Commenting on their research the scientists said, “this invention is a landmark research in face recognition, which can be applied for human identification in civil, defense as well as commercial biometric applications.”
“We are enthusiastic and passionate about the commercialization of this invention and hope our research outcomes and passion meet with the new goals and objectives of Vision 2030 to transform the Kingdom into a knowledge-based economy.”
Notably, the human face plays a key role in our daily social interactions and identification purposes, hence, automated face recognition has become one of the most important research areas of human identification or biometrics.
In the last few decades, biometric recognition has been an intensive field of research and development, and the human face has been a popular biometric identification factor used for investigative, security and anti-terrorism purposes due to its ease of use and potential ability to identify an individual from distance.
Automated face recognition is vital to perform real-time recognition of a person from a large-scale database.
Compared to other biometric systems, face identification has distinct advantages because of its non-contact interaction with the sensor or camera.
Face images can be captured from a distance without touching the person being identified, and the identification does not require interacting with the person.
In addition, face recognition could serve in crime deterrent because face images that have been recorded and archived in a database can later help in the identification of criminals.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), first used face biometrics in smart biometric passports, or e-passports, for border crossing and immigration purposes.