Smile for the camera: iFace recognition for iPhone

If you have to be subjected to surveillance, identification and security profiling, might as well have a shiny iPhone in the mix to make the erosion of your privacy rights that much easier to stomach. That's the scenario now that Animetrics' iPhone facial recognition product, iFace, is in limited release (per the Manchester Union Leader). Paired with the company's FIMS facial characteristics database, the iPhone app will allow law enforcement or military personnel to do field analysis of facial snapshots and possibly identify persons of interest.

While there are already portable devices that can be used to measure other biometric identifiers (iris imaging, fingerprints and the like), iFace is the first handheld product that will do facial feature recognition. Most of the testing for iFace has been done under controlled imaging conditions, so it's not clear yet how well the tool will perform in the real world.