Computer Vision News - October 2016

Traditionally, the identity of a person has always been verified face to face: when you start to work somewhere, on the first day you would often show your passport or ID to your new employer. Then, they would visually check if the photograph on your passport is the same as your face. These too may become old time memories thanks to Onfido, a British startup that has developed a technology using machine learning to bring all this process online and make it automated. In addition, it also prevents counterfeiters and fraudsters from creating sophisticated fakes. Basically, the Onfido platform comes with many features that provide identity verification online remotely. For example, it provides identity verification if someone wants to sign up for an online bank, become an Uber driver, clean houses, and other things which are done with no face to face interaction. The basis of the machine learning is in document verification. If you hold up a passport or driver’s license, the first step the app does is verifying the document: for example, it checks if it seems to be a genuine passport or a fraudulent one. Onfido does much more than comparing user data with an existing database: it actually compares images to verify the person and the document. As a user, you enter your name, date of birth, and address, then you hold up your driver’s license or passport, the app takes an image of that and verifies that it is genuine. Then you record your face in a new image and Onfido’s platform compares the photo of your face with the photograph on the identity document , in order to tell if your face matches the face on the documents. We asked Husayn Kassai, Onfido’s very young CEO and co-founder, about the application’s approach: it primarily uses deep learning so that, based on all of the historic documents already checked, the app knows if there are any anomalies. If any fraudulent document is found during the verification, the system learns all of its 20 Computer Vision News Application Onfido Application “ Comparing images to verify the person and the document ”