I know there was extensive testing when face recognition authentication came to smartphones. I wonder how an open source project like this one compares. I suspect there are substantially more false positives/negatives than on a commercially developed version that needs to support everyone to be successful.
This package is in no way as secure as a password and will never be. Although it's harder to fool than normal face recognition, a person who looks similar to you, or a well-printed photo of you could be enough to do it. Howdy is a more quick and convenient way of logging in, not a more secure one.
To minimize the chance of this program being compromised, it's recommended to leave Howdy in /lib/security and to keep it read-only.
DO NOT USE HOWDY AS THE SOLE AUTHENTICATION METHOD FOR YOUR SYSTEM."
Right, Windows Hello requires it for facial auth, Windows itself does not. Hello still works, just you have to authenticate with a different method if the hardware isn't present.
AFAIK Pixel phones, including the Pixel 9, only use 2D images for face unlock. So it's definitely possible to reach mainstream quality with conventional cameras.
(Unless you'd argue that the face unlock found on Pixels is not passable either)
I don't know how Google does it, but it's possible to extract 3d information from a 2d sensor. You either need a variable focus or phase detection in the sensor.
Very cool. Yes, probably? I'll have to think about the relationship between image quality and the fidelity of the derived phase measurement, because it's not obvious how good a camera needs to be to be "good enough" for a secure system.
I guess the task is to design an experiment to test the error between phase inferred from intensity in a digital camera by Huygens-Steiner and a barycentric coordinate map And far more expensive photonic phase sensors.
Is (framerate-1 Hz) a limit, due to the discrete derivative being null for the first n points?
> This means that hard-to-measure optical properties such as amplitudes, phases and correlations—perhaps even these of quantum wave systems—can be deduced from something a lot easier to measure: light intensity.
IDK what happened with wave field cameras like the Lytro. They're possibly useful for face ID, too?
