AF Looks to Facial Recognition to Secure Facilities

AF Looks to Facial Recognition to Secure Facilities

The Air Force’s AFWERX innovation arm is investing in real-time facial recognition to secure base perimeters and enhance situational awareness for Air Force security staff.

Announced earlier this month, AFWERX awarded two Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts to SAFR from RealNetworks to adapt its SAFR facial-recognition platform for use by a Security Forces Squadron and an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) wing

The central challenge for both projects is using a single platform that can analyze video from multiple devices -- drones, body-worn cameras and fixed surveillance cameras -- and determine that a facial image belongs to a live person, as opposed to a photograph or video of someone.

One way that’s done now is through challenge-response authentication in which a computer randomly selects a challenge that someone must do such as blink or look left. That’s not necessarily secure, though, said Eric Hess, senior director of product management for SAFR. Other approaches include using specialized hardware such as a 3D camera that is task-specific or infrared sensors to determine if someone emits heat, but those require more hardware and complexity.

“Really what everyone would like is to be able to take an RGB video stream from any camera -- whether it be a webcam, whether it be your surveillance camera, whether it be a camera on your iPhone or Android tablet -- and determine whether or not the image that you’re seeing is truly one that belongs to a human being,” Hess said. “That’s the holy grail.”

To do that, a server pulls all the video streams back, processes them, finds faces and extracts thumbnails to kick off the facial-recognition task.

As part of the SBIR award, SAFR is also working to use the processing power in the camera to search for faces. The camera, which is connected to the cloud, processes the video, detects faces, extracts those thumbnails and submits them to a cloud-based solution for matching. It returns names, dates, times, locations and source of the video.

For example, Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho is one of the few domestic military bases that have been approved to fly drones, which it can use to  control the base’s perimeter. If security forces see someone close to the fence who shouldn’t be, they can capture that person’s face from a drone camera and enroll it in the database. If that face shows up again – if that person comes to the main gate, for example -- the body-worn camera worn by the entry officer there could identify the face as belonging to someone who was seen near the perimeter.

The coronavirus inspired the second access-management project. The ISR wing wanted reduce the need for officials to touch surfaces before entering secure areas. “Today they use a PIN and a key card” for two-factor authentication, Hess said, but facial recognition would replace the PIN, removing the need to touch a keypad and making the key card and face the dual authenticators.

What’s more, the technology can still identify someone who is wearing a face mask, increasing both security and compliance with current health regulations. It can “recognize the person’s identity, confirm they have access rights to that specific doorway and then also confirm that they’re wearing a mask before you would unlock the door,” Hess said. “That way, you’ve authenticated them, it’s who they are, they have the right rights, and they’re wearing the face mask for health safety policy reasons.”

Under the contracts’ terms, both projects must be completed in 10 to 11 months. Once the platform is adapted for the Air Force, the SBIR program allows for any other federal agency to award a sole-source contract for technology developed under the program.

Featured

  • AI Is Now the Leading Cybersecurity Concern for Security, IT Leaders

    Arctic Wolf recently published findings from its State of Cybersecurity: 2025 Trends Report, offering insights from a global survey of more than 1,200 senior IT and cybersecurity decision-makers across 15 countries. Conducted by Sapio Research, the report captures the realities, risks, and readiness strategies shaping the modern security landscape. Read Now

  • Analysis of AI Tools Shows 85 Percent Have Been Breached

    AI tools are becoming essential to modern work, but their fast, unmonitored adoption is creating a new kind of security risk. Recent surveys reveal a clear trend – employees are rapidly adopting consumer-facing AI tools without employer approval, IT oversight, or any clear security policies. According to Cybernews Business Digital Index, nearly 90% of analyzed AI tools have been exposed to data breaches, putting businesses at severe risk. Read Now

  • Software Vulnerabilities Surged 61 Percent in 2024, According to New Report

    Action1, a provider of autonomous endpoint management (AEM) solutions, today released its 2025 Software Vulnerability Ratings Report, revealing a 61% year-over-year surge in discovered software vulnerabilities and a 96% spike in exploited vulnerabilities throughout 2024, amid an increasingly aggressive threat landscape. Read Now

  • Motorola Solutions Named Official Safety Technology Supplier of the Ryder Cup through 2027

    Motorola Solutions has today been named the Official Safety Technology Supplier of the 2025 and 2027 Ryder Cup, professional golf’s renowned biennial team competition between the United States and Europe. Read Now

  • Evolving Cybersecurity Strategies

    Organizations are increasingly turning their attention to human-focused security approaches, as two out of three (68%) cybersecurity incidents involve people. Threat actors are shifting from targeting networks and systems to hacking humans via social engineering methods, living off human errors as their most prevalent attack vector. Whether manipulated or not, human cyber behavior is leveraged to gain backdoor access into systems. This mainly results from a lack of employee training and awareness about evolving attack techniques employed by malign actors. Read Now

New Products

  • Unified VMS

    AxxonSoft introduces version 2.0 of the Axxon One VMS. The new release features integrations with various physical security systems, making Axxon One a unified VMS. Other enhancements include new AI video analytics and intelligent search functions, hardened cybersecurity, usability and performance improvements, and expanded cloud capabilities

  • FEP GameChanger

    FEP GameChanger

    Paige Datacom Solutions Introduces Important and Innovative Cabling Products GameChanger Cable, a proven and patented solution that significantly exceeds the reach of traditional category cable will now have a FEP/FEP construction.

  • 4K Video Decoder

    3xLOGIC’s VH-DECODER-4K is perfect for use in organizations of all sizes in diverse vertical sectors such as retail, leisure and hospitality, education and commercial premises.