Using Smart Glasses for Facial Recognition

Abstract

Facial recognition is one of the most promising applications of smart glasses and can help many organizations become more efficient. For example, police traditionally identify criminals by manually going through pictures in a database which makes face matching a slow process. However, with the combination of facial recognition software, smart glasses, and databases, the police can quickly scan through multiple databases of faces to find a match. The police would also be able to spot criminals in crowds, identify unknown victims at crime scenes, retrieve background information on individuals, and verify if someone is a missing person. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can also use this combination to identify potential terror suspects or verify the identity of travelers. Lastly, academia can benefit from these tools by being able to identify individuals at events (e.g. conferences) and display relevant information about them. The goal of this project is to write an Android program that takes a photo via Google Glass, compares it with a predefined sample database held within the smartphone, and outputs information based on its analysis. The results are displayed with an accuracy acceptance level to the user both on their Android smartphone and on their Google Glass.