The Covid-19 pandemic has heightened expectations and redefined standards for health and safety around the world. Mask wearing, temperature checks, symptom declarations, and contactless interactions have become the norm the moment we leave the comfort of our home.
Innovative companies have led the charge on many fronts to address the challenges posed by this global crisis. CyberLink’s FaceMe® technology is a good example. It is a complete solution for health and safety monitoring, using facial recognition to accurately screen individuals before entering a facility, even when masks obscure their faces or they are not looking straight into a camera. The convenience and effectiveness of facial recognition to address health and safety monitoring needs have been key drivers of the technology’s rapid adoption since the pandemic's beginning.
In this article, you will learn how to implement facial recognition technology for all of your health and safety protocol needs.
This cost-effective and non-intrusive screening technology automates the typically cumbersome process of performing an effective health check upon arrival at a location. Kiosks or checkpoints equipped with facial recognition and cameras can automatically detect if someone is wearing a mask and wearing it properly, covering the entire nose and mouth. The addition of a thermal camera enables precise body temperature measurement and sends an alert when someone entering shows signs of a possible fever. Unless there is an alert, there is no need for human intervention and no bottleneck as the entire process takes less than a second.
When determining if a health and safety solution using facial recognition is right for your business, there are several factors to consider.
First, determine the purpose of the facial recognition system. Is it needed for the sole purpose of performing health checks, including mask detection and temperature screening, or will it also be used to control the access of employees and visitors when they walk in?
It might be sufficient only to add checkpoints to verify mask-wearing and body temperatures in public areas and rely on existing access cards and visitor registration kiosks. However, a good facial recognition solution can also validate identity in less than a second and relay the information to different systems depending on the group with which someone is associated. For example, an employee’s attendance record would be automatically updated or security would receive an alert if a block-listed person was identified. It can eliminate the need for a number of error-prone legacy systems with one contactless, instantaneous, and highly accurate face capture.
To illustrate, a bank's health and security protocols will vary greatly from a food service establishment’s. A bank will need stringent security protocols in addition to health checks. Therefore, besides checking mask wearing and body temperatures, bank security will want to confirm the identity of each person trying to enter any of the restricted areas typical in this type of establishment. However, proper and effective health protocol to access its kitchens will be far more important for restaurants than verifying each person's identity.
Learn more about the top 7 success factors to consider when choosing the best facial recognition solution for your requirements.
We will use a fictitious restaurant to illustrate the implementation of facial recognition for health and safety through three processes:
When employees enter the facility, a hybrid RGB/thermal camera detects whether masks are properly worn over the mouth and nose and measures body temperature, instantly flagging non-compliant employees before they can even start their shifts.
Read our case study on how ACE Biotek adopted facial recognition for access control and health screenings.
Facial recognition can also analyze the video feed of cameras located throughout the facilities to ensure all shifts are running smoothly and safely. Among the many checks that can be performed is mask detection, to ensure employees wear their mouth covers at all times. It can identify employees overdue for a break to avoid the risks and dangers associated with fatigue. It can also send an alert if an employee is spending an abnormal amount of time in an area such as a freezer room.
Only authorized people must access restricted areas such as control and server rooms, management offices, and storage rooms. Instead of keys or digital codes, which can easily be shared or stolen, the use of a reliable facial recognition solution like FaceMe®, with an accuracy rate of up to 99.7%, provides secure, frictionless authentication and access control.
Now that you’ve determined the features you need, you must ensure you have the proper hardware and infrastructure.
Making decisions like the following will help you determine the hardware and infrastructure needs:
Offered both as a flexible software development kit (SDK) or an out-of-the-box software solution, FaceMe® can be efficiently deployed across any IT infrastructure, including:
After answering questions relative to the various aspects of the project, you have all you need to assemble the blueprint, evaluate the costs, and implement the solution.
Dive deeper into how to use facial recognition technology to build your solution.
The FaceMe®SDK is a cross-platform facial recognition engine ideal for custom scenarios and unique user experiences. It gives you complete control to adapt the engine to your infrastructure. FaceMe® offers one of the highest accuracy rates, 99.7%, as independently established by the NIST Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT). FaceMe remains highly accurate when a mask is worn, with a rate that can reach 98.9%. It is optimized to run across hardware configurations, from high-end workstations to low-power chipsets typically used in IoT devices, and can run on Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS systems. You can read more about FaceMe® SDK’s system requirements.
FaceMe® Security is turnkey software that can add facial recognition to almost any IP-based surveillance infrastructure, workstations and servers, VMS (video management systems), and IP cameras. FaceMe® Security can conduct a wide range of tasks from identity verification, visitor check-in, and employee time clock, to mask detection, real-time monitoring, and instant alerts.
You can customize FaceMe® Security and expand its capabilities with a number of add-ons.
The FaceMe® Health Add-on combines health monitoring with facial recognition, adding three checks crucial to preventing the spread of viruses like Covid-19:
The Health Add-on can greatly help organizations’ facility managers and health and safety departments, contributing to reducing virus transmission and ensuring individuals remain healthy and able to perform their work activities.
Additional add-ons for FaceMe® Security include:
While vaccination rates continue to rise, it’s clear we are far from being past the pandemic. Masks must still be worn almost anywhere we go, and there is no end in sight to the mutations into new variants. Investments in new and innovative technologies like facial recognition can help everyone stay safe and healthy, not only today but well into the future, as we navigate the new normal.
To learn more about FaceMe®, please visit the FaceMe official website or contact our sales team today!
ContactOur team of experts will be happy to answer your questions and schedule a demo. Free evaluation versions of the FaceMe® are available to qualified contacts.
