Omron offers face recognition security for phones, PDAs

Omron has developed a face-recognition technology for use as a security system in camera-enabled cell phones and other handheld devices, the company said Monday.

The system is intended to provide an alternative to a password or fingerprint scanner for controlling access to the device, Omron said in a statement.

Users first register their own face with the system by taking a picture of themselves. The company’s “Okao Vision” engine converts the picture into a face-print that takes up about 1.5KB of storage space. To verify identity, users must take a picture of themselves again.

Omron said the system takes about one second to process the image and has a more than 99 percent success rate in determining whether the image is that of the authorized user.

It requires no additional hardware and works with image sensors already fitted into cell phones, so long as they are 100,000-pixel resolution or higher, said Takayuki Nakamura, a spokesman for Omron in Tokyo. Higher resolution sensors will not have any effect on the accuracy of the system, he said.

Versions of the software are available for the Symbian, Brew, embedded Linux, and Itron OS platforms, according to the statement. The application occupies about 450KB of the device’s ROM and 370KB of RAM.

Cell phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) featuring fingerprint sensors are already available from several vendors. Fujitsu offers a 3G (third-generation) cell phone in Japan with such a function and some models of Hewlett-Packard’s iPaq PDAs also feature a fingerprint sensor.

With such devices holding more personal information and offering the ability to perform wireless commerce, the need for secure access is increasing.

Omron will demonstrate the system later this week at the Security Show 2005, which takes place at the Tokyo Big Sight exhibition center from March 2 until March 4. The company did not provide an estimate for how much the system would add to the manufacturing cost of a cell phone.