Facial Recognition Being Used In 30 Churches Around The World
track congregants that skip services
June 26, 2015
It's not just law enforcement and companies with trade
secrets who want to use facial recognition – churches are now jumping on
the bandwagon too.About 30 churches in the world in countries such as Indonesia, the US, Portugal, Africa and India are now using a facial recognition software called Churchix to track their congregants from a database of photographs that have been uploaded to the software.
The churches are able to track which congregants are attending services and which are missing events, by using CCTV cameras that scan people's faces as they walk into the building. The video footage is sent to a PC where the software is installed, and this then analyses the footage for recognisable faces.
Churches are struggling to keep track of their members
The idea is that the church can then make contact with congregants to find out why they might not be attending, or even send out a call to action for donations to the congregants who are most fervent in their attendance of church events.The church can also use the software as a security system, by uploading photos of people who have been banned from the church, local criminals or sex offenders. If someone on the black list enters the church, the administrator will receive an alert letting them know, so they can take action.
"In the beginning I was surprised. We never thought of churches as potential clients, but we now understand the need. Most churches do already keep track of their members," Moshe Greenshpan, the CEO of facial recognition software firm Face-Six told IBTimes UK.
"The job of keeping track becomes very difficult when you have many members in your church. When you have 1,000 members, it's very hard to keep track manually."
The software was launched four months ago and is only a small part of Face-Six, which is based in Israel and the US. The firm focuses on high-end video surveillance for law enforcement and large public venues like airports and casinos, as well as facial recognition software that tracks how many unique visitors walk into shopping malls.
