The COVID-19 pandemic has single handedly redefined hygiene and health expectations for people around the world, with mask wearing, symptom checking and contactless methods of life becoming standard protocol for one’s daily routine. 

Last month, Taipei-based artificial intelligence and digital imaging technology company CyberLink Corporation announced FaceMe Health, an integrated and contactless biometric-based solution for mask detection, authentication and temperature measurement. This service offers contactless pandemic control measures that storefronts, airports, factory plants, and much more can implement into their facilities. 

CyberLink and Its Journey Toward FaceMe Health

CyberLink Corp. was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. As a digital media software company with a specialization in artificial intelligence facial recognition technology, CyberLink currently has over 200 patented technologies and over 400 million software and applications shipped worldwide. 

The company has developed software ranging from their Director software family for photo, video, and audio editing to their artificial intelligence facial recognition engine, FaceMe, which has been used for everything from virtual makeup studios to mask recognition for COVID-19 safety.

“We had to develop a very precise algorithm to map vectors on people’s faces, and had to do it at the cutting-edge in real-time with low-powered processors on smart devices and various platforms,” explained Richard Carriere, the Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and General Manager, US, for CyberLink. “The technology needed to work on iOS and Android also needed to be embeddable in any browser and server. So from that, we started developing separately our facial recognition SDK, FaceMe. And once we started benchmarking it, it performed extremely well.”

From the conception of FaceMe’s application for COVID-19 safety measures in May 2020, CyberLink built out all of the components of FaceMe Health’s SDK by June 2020 and had it ready for deployment in an all-in-one software package last month.

Facial Recognition for Pandemic Control

Recent regulations around the world regarding the requirement of face-coverings and masks has rendered a lot of identity verification technology useless. However, in a time where reducing disease transmission is important, identifying who is entering which buildings at what time is equally as important, especially for contact-tracing purposes. CyberLink’s work on FaceMe Health aims to solve this problem.

Key features of the SDK include:

• Identity verification while the user is wearing a mask at 95% accuracy
• Mask detection
• Spoofing prevention for improper use of masks
• Detection of masks of different types, materials and camera angles
• Temperature measurement via thermal camera
• Instant alert via U Alert for concerning results

In addition to these features, FaceMe Health presents itself as an interoperable, versatile and cost-effective solution. According to CyberLink, FaceMe Health can be installed on any personal or industrial computer that has an 8th Generation Intel Core i3 CPU processor at minimum. Aside from this requirement, the only other hardware needed is a connected webcam and thermal camera.

Currently, one of the biggest efforts to deploy FaceMe Health is being done in partnership with Bluestar, a global distributor of solutions-based Digital Identification, Mobility, Point-of-Sale, RFID, Digital Signage, and Security technology solutions. Together, Bluestar and CyberLink are creating an all-in-one health kiosk with FaceMe Health technology that will also require people to sanitize their hands before entering a building. The kiosks have currently been deployed at some industrial workplaces, but the companies hope to soon deploy more kiosks in restaurants, schools, airports and more.

“Our multifaceted solution creates a lot of flexibility and can be deployed in very large deployments, and, in most cases, can be retrofitted to existing security systems,” said Carriere. “This all makes the solution very cost-effective, and because everything can be run at the edge, the technology is also very secure and fast. You don’t have to send anything to the cloud and back, and the data is encrypted since we don’t need to capture actual pictures; only the vectors of somebody’s face—it’s extremely safe.”

As a contact-free solution for improving health and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, FaceMe Health is just one example of how cutting-edge technology can help keep people safer at a very low risk to the general public, assuaging many of the privacy concerns that arise with other pandemic-control protocols.