Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Freakishly accurate A.I. security system identifies you based on your footsteps

By

From our voice to our faces to more unorthodox methods like our “heartprint,” there are a growing number of ways for computers to recognize their users. We have yet to come across one based on our footsteps, however. Researchers from the U.K.’s University of Manchester and Spain’s Universidad Autonoma de Madrid are working to change that. A new A.I. biometric verification method can successfully identify individuals by the way they walk across a pressure pad on the floor. The technology could one day be used as an alternative, or augmentation, to existing biometric identification system in places like airports.

“We have realized that sensing human gait has biometric potential from the early days when we demonstrated the Manchester ‘Magic Carpet’ to user groups back in 2010,” Krikor Ozanyan, Professor of Photonic Sensors & Systems at Manchester, told Digital Trends. “However, decisive progress has been made recently by using artificial intelligence to process the floor senor data in a new way. As the latest development, we teamed up with Universidad Autonoma de Madrid to apply our existing models, and to develop new ones, for experimenting on an existing unique footstep database SFootDB — containing a single stride from a large number of individuals.”

Recommended Videos

In test conditions, the footstep-recognizing A.I. was able to correctly identify individuals with close to perfect accuracy, with an error rate of just 0.7 percent.

Related

According to Ozanyan, the methodology could be particularly useful for identifying individuals in crowded locations, such as on an airport concourse. Despite a recent story from China claiming that a known criminal was identified using facial recognition in a crowd of thousands, such approaches may not necessarily prove effective. On the other hand, the ability to single out known individuals from a large group of unknowns by getting them to cross a pressure-sensing threshold could be extremely helpful. It could also potentially be used in smart home environments to recognize individual members of the family or household.

“The use of artificial intelligence on footstep data is efficient from the point of view of cost of deployment, resources, upgrades, connectivity and privacy concerns,” Ozanyan continued. “Beyond biometrics, the home scenario is the entry point for the huge area of healthcare, where the occupants’ gait can be monitored over a very long period of time so that subtle changes in their gait patterns can be attributed to normal ageing or to cognitive decline — possibly linked to the early onset of mental illness.”

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Luke Dormehl
Luke Dormehl
Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
How the USPS uses Nvidia GPUs and A.I. to track missing mail
A United States Postal Service USPS truck driving on a tree-lined street.

The United States Postal Service, or USPS, is relying on artificial intelligence-powered by Nvidia's EGX systems to track more than 100 million pieces of mail a day that goes through its network. The world's busiest postal service system is relying on GPU-accelerated A.I. systems to help solve the challenges of locating lost or missing packages and mail. Essentially, the USPS turned to A.I. to help it locate a "needle in a haystack."

To solve that challenge, USPS engineers created an edge A.I. system of servers that can scan and locate mail. They created algorithms for the system that were trained on 13 Nvidia DGX systems located at USPS data centers. Nvidia's DGX A100 systems, for reference, pack in five petaflops of compute power and cost just under $200,000. It is based on the same Ampere architecture found on Nvidia's consumer GeForce RTX 3000 series GPUs.

Read more
Algorithmic architecture: Should we let A.I. design buildings for us?
Generated Venice cities

Designs iterate over time. Architecture designed and built in 1921 won’t look the same as a building from 1971 or from 2021. Trends change, materials evolve, and issues like sustainability gain importance, among other factors. But what if this evolution wasn’t just about the types of buildings architects design, but was, in fact, key to how they design? That’s the promise of evolutionary algorithms as a design tool.

While designers have long since used tools like Computer Aided Design (CAD) to help conceptualize projects, proponents of generative design want to go several steps further. They want to use algorithms that mimic evolutionary processes inside a computer to help design buildings from the ground up. And, at least when it comes to houses, the results are pretty darn interesting.
Generative design
Celestino Soddu has been working with evolutionary algorithms for longer than most people working today have been using computers. A contemporary Italian architect and designer now in his mid-70s, Soddu became interested in the technology’s potential impact on design back in the days of the Apple II. What interested him was the potential for endlessly riffing on a theme. Or as Soddu, who is also professor of generative design at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, told Digital Trends, he liked the idea of “opening the door to endless variation.”

Read more
Emotion-sensing A.I. is here, and it could be in your next job interview
man speaking into phone

I vividly remember witnessing speech recognition technology in action for the first time. It was in the mid-1990s on a Macintosh computer in my grade school classroom. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” -- and this was magical all right, seeing spoken words appearing on the screen without anyone having to physically hammer them out on a keyboard.

Jump forward another couple of decades, and now a large (and rapidly growing) number of our devices feature A.I. assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. These tools, built using the latest artificial intelligence technology, aren’t simply able to transcribe words -- they are able to make sense of their contents to carry out actions.

Read more