Technology has advanced so fast and far now that we have CCTV facial recognition, but is it reliable, how does it work and is it safe?

How does it work?

A picture of your face looking forward or nearly in profile is read by the face recognition software. It reads the geometry of your face which includes key details like the distance between your eyes.

Once it has identified all key features that will determine your face, your facial signature is created. Your facial signature is compared against a database of known faces for a match. If there’s none found, an alert will be sent or the cops will be called.

How reliable is it?

Like normal CCTV cameras, that depends on the quality of the camera, lower quality, and cheaper facial recognition cameras are unable to recognize faces properly and may alert you wrongly due to that. Moreover, these cheaper cameras may take a longer time to identify faces or be unable to identify them at all.

However, good face recognition cameras can identify faces a lot more reliably especially as you use it more and more facial signatures are added to its database, as the software depends on it to recognize faces.

Alternatives to facial recognition

As facial recognition cameras are very new, they can be on the unreliable side, so if you’re looking for a reliable way to catch intruders, motion detection cameras can be a good alternative to it. Like facial recognition cameras, motion detection cameras will send an alert, but it’s when it detects motion going by in its viewing range and its unable to differentiate between people, so you’ll want to use it for sensitive areas where you don’t want people to enter at all.