Facial recognition technology has been making the news recently with several larger project underway globally, and new research now predicts that face and iris recognition will soon cannibalise on fingerprint.

From a new facial recognition system at Changi airport, which aims to make the traveller’s experience more efficient, to Nest Hello, Google’s facial recognition video doorbell that challenges Amazon’s Ring in the UK, these technologies are gaining ground worldwide for business and consumer use. Nest’s big differentiating feature, however, is its machine-learning technology that analyses video from the front door, which Google claims can differentiate between people walking by, visitors or delivery people approaching and loitering burglars, only alerting users when necessary.

Despite privacy concerns, face and iris recognition are continuously gaining strength, threating to soon cannibalise on fingerprint technologies. ABI Research reckons that posits they will both slowly start to eat away at fingerprint implementations on the back of falling ASPs for iris modules combined with improvements in face recognition capability.

Apple’s choice to forego fingerprints and focus on face recognition for the iPhone X and Samsung’s choice to focus on iris recognition for the Galaxy S8 and S9 have fast-tracked this realisation, the researcher says.

From established markets such as banking and payments to emerging ones like automotive and future-looking ones including robotics, ABI expects to see an increase in multi-modal applications and a scenario where biometrics is a critical component of a user’s digital ID in the emerging IoT ecosystem. It sees biometrics expanding further into banking, consumer, and telecoms, with multimodal user authentication being the order of the day.

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