Sony: Just Smile to Unlock Your Smartphone

Whenever you use weak passwords e.g. your phone number or date of birth, you make your account vulnerable as these sort of passwords are easy to guess by doing a little social engineering. And if your email account has compromised, then without any efforts, a smart hacker can access your other accounts (FB, Twitter) linked with it.

Thus, the password-only authentication is not reliable if someone is lazy enough to set a strong password. Face recognition is a good method to ensure that a person is who he claims to be. However, it can also be easily bypassed. For example, I can bring your photographs in front of a security camera to gain access.

It’s important to know that no security system is perfect. Once it was impossible for anyone to reproduce your fingerprints. However, today, the modern printing techniques can help me to bypass biometric authentication.

I can use rubber cement or Silicone gel to create counterfeit fingerprints of yours, and login into your laptop or other devices.

Now the question is – what can be the better solution that can obviate the above mentioned problems? And the answer is – gesture and expression based security system. Gesture recognition is future of technology. According to a report by MarketsandMarkets , the market of gesture recognition in Asia is expected to reach $4.18 billion by 2018.

Sony is among the key players of gesture recognition technology market. They already have brought gesture sensing games and now one of their patent applications suggests that they are working on gesture and expression based authentication system. The patent application can be accessed from here.

The gesture and expression based security system of Sony is combining different authentication methods to avert security breaches. It is combining facial recognition, voice recognition, facial expressions, gestures, and IR sensing. This feature could be a better alternate of Samsung’s iris scanner.

There will be no need to enter your password to login into your laptop or to unlock your smart phone. What you have to do is – a smile. You have to smile (a gesture) and your smart phone or laptop will be unlocked, the security door of your office will open or the like.

Steps Followed in Sony’s Gesture and Expression Based Authentication

The security system of Sony consists of two modes of authentication. The third mode can be activated if desired.

The user interface with provide you a list that includes facial recognition, IR sensing, voice recognition, keypad entry, or gestures as options. You will select one option among these for first mode and in the subsequent modes; the previously selected option will be excluded from the list.

The patent says that the first mode makes facial recognition as mandatory. Thus, the fist mode is face recognition mode with a combination of voice recognition, keypad entry, or gestures. And in the second mode, you can select among any of the remaining options.

To give you an example, if you select the first mode as facial recognition with IR sensing then the cameras will use IR sensors while performing facial recognition. The IR sensors will negate the instances where a person brings a photograph of another person in front of a security camera to gain access.

If you select gesture in then you can provide a gesture input with facial recognition. You can wave your hand or even can perform a dance step in front of the camera to get access.

You can use an expression based authentication to make the logon even more interesting. You will be smiling or frowning in front of the security camera or you can even sing your favorite song by selecting voice input as an option. Or yell “get up” in front of your laptop or Smartphone and you will be logged on.

Do you know? : Samsung will give us different tastes to unlock a smartphone through stylus