RecognizeMe is touted as the first ever facial recognition app for iOS. It’s a jailbreak app of course, and is available as a paid app in the Cydia jailbreak app store.
I think the concept for the app is a great one, so I bought it over the weekend and gave it a try. The idea is that RecognizeMe implements facial recognition, so that it can be used as an alternate method of unlocking your jailbroken iOS device (those that have front-facing cameras and can be jailbroken). It sits on top of the unlock screen so that you can tap on it to choose to use facial recognition rather than entering a passcode.
If this works well, I think it’s a great time-saver and a very nice feature. It would make me much more tempted to use a longer, more secure passcode if I knew I had a reliable quicker option to invoke.
Sadly, RecognizeMe is not there yet in terms of being a reliable solution, or at least not in my experience with it thus far.
You need to spend some time training the app, with its Face Trainer, before you can start putting it to use. The app’s Help section offers advice on how to get best results with it – by making sure you have even light on your face and by creating at least three training sets, with varied amounts of light on your face (Low, Medium, and High).
I followed that guidance as best as I could – it was tough to get three good sets for me because the app took ages and ages to perform its face scans each time – and often complained that it could not find my face even when I could clearly see it in the camera screen.
Eventually the sets got done, and I tried out the app’s ability as an option on the unlock screen. Unfortunately I had no luck at all. It always fails to recognize my face – and pops up alternating messages saying ‘Found your face’ and ‘Can’t find your face’ continually. It also takes a long time on each scan attempt, pretty much defeating the whole idea of this being a quicker alternative for the unlock screen.
I still love the idea of RecognizeMe, so I hope the developer will keep updating it and making it work better.
Here’s the details page for RecognizeMe at the Cydia Search site: http://planet-iphones.com/cydia/id/com.apocolipse.recognizeme
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