Facial features detection for facial recognition for the purpose of authentication on android mobile devices

Abstract: Modern mobile devices have become very powerful. All kinds of sensitive data are stored and accessed through these devices. Mobile banking, m-commerce and web- browsing are some of the activities one performs with smart phones or tablets. The security of the data stored and accessed through mobile devices (like emails and private documents) is crucial. Password protection has proved to be weak for mobile phone protection. Biometrics security has been developed and is used more and more on mobile devices. The use of facial recognition for authentication on mobile devices is an extensively researched area. Issues that are usually encountered are the limitations of the mobile devices in terms of limited memory, limited processing power and poor image quality, although these are improving quite rapidly. The purpose of this research is to explore the different solutions to the problem of improving mobile device security using facial recognition technology. The diverse solutions proposed in the literature were investigated to determine what solutions had been proposed and implemented and to determine which ones gave the best results. This was done in such a way that the chosen solution was compatible with the limited hardware and memory capabilities of these devices. In this study, many image processing algorithms from the available literature were explored. Feature-based facial recognition systems were found to be computationally less expensive and relatively simple to implement. An algorithm based on geometric measurements of the face and the Golden Ratio was proposed and implemented on an Android platform. The application was tested on the Samsung Galaxy Tablet 10.1.M.Ing. (Electrical and Electronic Engineering