How a N.B. research team wants to identify people through their footsteps | 24CA News
A group of researchers on the University of New Brunswick is moving into new biometric safety territory they consider could at some point change facial recognition and fingerprint scanners.
“This sort of technology could be an alternative to existing approaches like fingerprints or facial recognition, which have really been challenged during COVID with things like face masks or people not wanting to contact other surfaces,” stated Erik Scheme, who’s a professor and affiliate director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering on the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.
His group is growing a first-of-its-kind safety system that makes use of footsteps to confirm folks’s identities.
Scheme is tapping into the experience of prime college students from Tunisia and India to advance their groundbreaking system, which he says can distinguish between folks based mostly on their private gaits.
“The way you roll your foot over one way or the other as you go from your heel to your toe,” stated Scheme, who stated the know-how generates a warmth map of the stress factors that, very like fingerprints, are distinctive to each particular person.
Mayssa Rekik, a sophisticated applied sciences undergraduate on the Tunisia-based University of Carthage. She is one in every of 168 worldwide college students in Atlantic Canada this summer season serving to to unravel robust innovation challenges by way of a singular initiative referred to as the Mitacs Globalink Research Internship program.
The tile know-how developed by P.E.I.-based Stepscan Technologies is presently put in in Fredericton’s Cyber Centre, the place Rekik demonstrates how the tiles choose up on a person’s private gate.
“As I am walking the floor is identifying who I am,” Rekik stated.
“This is the first installation of gait-based recognition technology to be embedded in the floor of an existing office building and it’s really allowing us to test how these systems could operate in the wild for the first time,” Scheme stated.
Ala Salehi is a UNB electrical engineering grasp’s pupil additionally engaged on the challenge.
“You can use it in airports and office and home — depends on the application that you are looking for,” Salehi stated.
But what the group believes shall be most interesting to customers is the know-how’s discretion.
“Some people around the world are pushing back on the use of video,” stated Scheme, who stated it’s almost not possible for an individual to imitate another person’s gait.
“It is both more private but also harder to imitate as well.”
The know-how remains to be very a lot within the analysis phases. The group is accumulating gait analyses of 200 check topics to create a database for use by different researchers across the globe.
“You can think of one day walking into a location without even having to identify yourself because as you walk that is the identification itself,” Scheme stated.
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