What is Facial Authentication?

The field of computer vision seeks to help computers "see" images and videos at a high level, in the same way that humans can--but within this domain, there are many different subfields and applications. Facial authentication is a task in computer vision that seeks to verify a person's identity by using their facial characteristics and features as biometric identifiers. Facial authentication is similar to, yet distinct from, facial recognition. The term "facial recognition" describes any system that can identify individual people via their facial features, often using surveillance videos as input. However, facial authentication is strictly opt-in: individuals knowingly present their face to the system, usually for security purposes.