Friday, January 6, 2012

Biometric Technologies, Wildlife Conservation and Your Business

Part of the Wired (UK) series: 25 big ideas for 2012: Connected conservation
Now researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich have developed a system that can rapidly process images of great apes in order to recognise them more quickly in the wild. The program isolates individual faces and captures their biometric data.
and
As Fraunhofer researcher Alexander Loos says: "These new technologies mean that human resources can be allocated to more complex tasks than filling out checklists."
This short chapter in the larger Wired series touches upon two key aspects of the biometrics value proposition: ID management and Increased Productivity.

Facial recognition can help transform a task that humans find difficult into a task that we're actually quite good at [see: (Facial Recognition vs Human) & (Facial Recognition + Human)].

In this primate case, facial recognition likely helps researchers become familiar with individuals more quickly and prevents some misidentifications from occurring.

The last quote above is a perfect illustration of the productivity gains that biometric systems can help deliver. Many highly skilled people spend a lot of their time doing identity management tasks that they don't find particularly interesting and that can be done more quickly and effectively with the assistance of better technology. Examples include teachers taking classroom attendance and retail managers shuffling time cards.

If primate researchers in the middle of a jungle have improved their accuracy and efficiency using better identity management technology, your business probably can, too.