In the 1960s, Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe developed a system to classify photos of faces by hand and then used something called a RAND tablet to detect vertical and horizontal features of the face, which were then recorded in a database. Back in those days computing power was limited, and the technology was not available to properly leverage the RAND measurements or share them in a meaningful way, so the invention never really got off the ground. However, the development of the technique would prove to be instrumental in the future innovation of facial recognition. Over the next 40 years the technology would improve, but the real advancements came once high-definition cameras became available to businesses.
Fast forward to today – facial recognition has been available to the casino market for about 20 years, however, until recently the technology was still in its infancy, making the accuracy and consistency of facial detection less than acceptable. Over the years the technology has continued to improve with the algorithmic development of facial recognition itself. The algorithms became more robust and able to detect more unique points of the face, which improved both facial matching accuracy and the frequency at which faces could be detected, even from multiple angles.