The Power of Facial Recognition and Analysis in Events
While facial recognition is often considered modern technology, did you know that facial recognition is already 50 years old? And it has come a long way since its humble beginnings.
Computer vision, facial recognition and facial analysis
Today, facial recognition technology is more commonly seen in mobile devices – where our faces are used instead of passcodes and thumbprints. But even this technology implementation is likely to be primitive soon, as computer vision is set to take facial recognition (and, by extension, facial analysis) to the next level. And one of its most notable implementations is at busy events.
Technology sees all
With one camera, event planners can soon learn more about their event (and attendees) than ever before. Have a bigger space or multiple rooms to cover? Just add a few more cameras to the network, and each camera will capture, collate and analyse massive amounts of information – that event planners could previously never have dreamed of capturing using manual processes.
What’s your headcount?
Want to know how many people are at your event? You can get that number based on registration figures. But do you know many people are at each area of your event? (i.e. Getting refreshments, browsing merchandise, attending presentations and breakout sessions, and more.)
The cameras you’ve placed around the event space have the answer. Better yet, they also know how many people are in each area – so you’ll have some solid analytics for optimising and planning future events.
Who’s there?
It gets even better. Facial recognition technology enables your cameras to count the number of faces it sees in a room and identify the individuals in each of these spaces.
This will allow you to see if a participant is following the programme or wandering wherever they please. In terms of security, this also makes it easier to spot unauthorised personnel and attendees – and your security team can be proactively alerted of such incidents rather than having to eyeball every participant. (Which would not be humanly possible at all but the smallest of events.)
Details, details, details
Diving deeper into the possibilities of computer vision, facial analysis and artificial intelligence, your cameras and systems should accurately assess the age and gender of participants.
For public events where registration may not be necessary, this intelligence will benefit your events and marketing teams – as they will have a good overview of who’s interested in and attending your events.
What does all this data mean for event planners?
By putting all this information into a report and crunching your figures, you can get an excellent overview of some critical aspects of your event, including:
How much engagement was that at each area of your event? Which activities, exhibits, booths or speakers gathered the most attention from attendees?
Where and when did audiences seem to smile most? You can probably conclude why from this data (and your programme and event layout).
Was the flow of human traffic well-planned, or were there areas at which participants seemed to be stuck – or lost?
Were your exhibitors happy, and could you improve booth placement for future events? (A look at your traffic flow could help determine this.)
Facial recognition is only beginning to find its place at events, but it could soon deliver significant advantages to event planners who take note of it. We certainly think it’s worth watching this up-and-coming event tech.
