Home

Blogger Breaks Android Face Recognition with... a Picture?

18.05.12

There's always a scene in your average spy action movie thriller that goes a little something like this: The protagonist somehow ends up with a recording of a person's voice (or in gutsier movies, a copy of their fingerprint and/or eyeball), which said super-spy then uses to gain access to a voice-, fingerprint-, or retina-locked room. Valuables and information critical to the plot: pilfered.

One of the new features in the latest iteration of Google's mobile OS, Android 4.0 (codename: Ice Cream Sandwich), is the ability to unlock one's phone using one's noggin. In other words, your phone –the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, to use the market's only example at the moment – uses its front-facing camera to take a gander at your face. If it recognizes you, the phone automatically unlocks without need for a PIN code or some kind of graphical unlocking mechanism.

Neat, huh?

Of course, facial recognition isn't without its pitfalls – the technology just plain didn't work when demonstrated during the Galaxy Nexus announcement this past October. But what happens when facial recognition works too well? Or, to put it another way, what happens when the phone recognizes a face, but the face isn't a living, breathing user holding said phone?

Source: PC Magazine