International. The size of the global post-Covid-19 facial recognition market is expected to grow from the US$3.8 billion recorded in 2020 to US$8.5 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.2% during the forecast period, analyst MarketsandMarkets reported.
The major factors driving the growth of the facial recognition market are the increasing importance of the surveillance industry, the increasing investment in facial recognition technologies by the government and defense sector, and the increasing technological advancement in the industry verticals. However, facial occlusion and face detection error, and lack of knowledge and awareness are some of the major challenges hindering the growth of the facial recognition market, according to the report.
Impact of Covid-19
Given the scale of the pandemic, technology will play a crucial role in addressing all facets of Covid-19. There is also a gradual increase in the number of facial recognition use cases to increase demand. The main applications introduced through facial recognition systems are for security assessment and identity verification. In many countries, law enforcement and the organization have moved from legacy systems to facial recognition solutions to reduce the overall spread of Covid-19. In addition, the application of thermal camera controls through these systems is being adopted by healthcare systems around the world.
Market dynamics
Trend: Growing importance of the surveillance industry
In today's business world, the need to protect information and physical property is extremely important and increasingly difficult. The increasing demand for surveillance has become one of the major factors driving the growth of the facial recognition market. The emergence of several new technologies such as high-definition CCTV, high-resolution 3D facial recognition technologies, and thermal facial recognition technology has driven the growth of the market.
Coincidentally, this has increased the integration of facial recognition technology and analytics with that of the existing surveillance infrastructure for the accurate identification of a person or group of people in videos captured through surveillance systems.
Restriction: Difficulty countering legal risks and e-discovery
Facial recognition technology is used in vertical sectors ranging from healthcare and retail to government and defense. Federal and police departments also use facial recognition technologies to catch suspected criminals in different cases. Although federal and police departments use this technology, the possibility of fake matches poses a major problem in the implementation of facial recognition technologies.
For example, Boston's Logan Airport conducted two independent tests of the facial recognition system at its security checkpoints, using volunteers posing as terrorists over a three-month period and yielding conflicting results. During the trial period, the systems correctly identified the volunteers 153 times and were unable to identify the volunteers 96 times. The high number of false alarms can result in the arrest of innocent people who have no criminal record against them. The detention of innocent people could lead them to take legal action against the authorities concerned. Therefore, this also remains a major constraint on the implementation of facial recognition technology.
Opportunity: Adoption of cloud-based facial recognition technology
IoT adoption is experiencing exponential growth that also proves to be a prerequisite for facial recognition technologies, such as facial recognition, middleware, modeling and restructuring, and analytics. The growing cloud storage, which is expected to reach $65.41 billion by 2020, has provided a robust cloud-based storage platform, allowing captured data to be easily stored and accessed from mobile devices and platforms.
The growing adoption of cloud-based technology and IoT is a huge opportunity for the growth of facial recognition providers, which would remove barriers related to high costs.
Challenge: Facial Occlusion and Face Detection Error
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (a federal agency), facial recognition systems misidentified people of color more often than white people. In the U.S., the error rate, along with other concerns, can create problems in some cities. For example, Oakland and San Francisco have banned the use of facial recognition technology. In addition, large corporations such as Amazon, IBM, Google and Microsoft have announced that they will not provide facial recognition technology to police departments until specific regulations are in place to protect data and minimize errors. This decision will push the federal government to adopt comprehensive legislation to regulate the use of this technology.
Among the end-user segment, Government and Defense will maintain the largest market size during the forecast period
The growing number of government and defense investments in the implementation of facial recognition technology for various activities, such as border control and criminal identification, is driving the adoption of facial recognition technology solutions and services. Facial recognition facilitates the identification and verification process; therefore, it is being widely adopted for immigration at airports and attendance tracking and monitoring. Increasing technological advances across all sectors are encouraging companies to adopt facial recognition tools and services to facilitate manual processing and save time.
