A facial presence monitoring system for information security

Information security requires a method to establish digital credentials that can reliably identify individual users. Since biometrics is concerned with the measurements of unique human physiological or behavioural characteristics, the technology has been used to verify the identity of computer or network users. Given today's heightened security requirements of military as well as other applications such as banking, health care, etc., it is becoming critical to be able to monitor the presence of the authenticated user throughout a session. This paper presents a prototype system that uses facial recognition technology to monitor the authenticated user. The objective is to ensure that the user who is using the computer is the same person that logged onto the system. A neural network-based algorithm is implemented to carry out face detection, and an eigenface method is employed to perform facial recognition. A graphical user interface (GUI) has been developed which allows the performance of face detection and facial recognition to be monitored at run time. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of near-real-time continuous user verification for high-level security information systems.