I Have My Eye on You

A casino is often the target of thieves trying to make a quick buck. As a result security in casinos has evolved into one of the most sophisticated security systems available. The movie Ocean’s Eleven famously makes reference to casino security with this quote, ‘I know more about casino security than any man alive, I invented it, and it cannot be beaten. They got cameras, they got locks, they got watchers, they got timers, they got vaults, they got enough armed personnel to occupy Paris’.

Casinos have recently introduced a new security measure, facial recognition, to help prevent incidents occurring on the gaming floor. A facial recognition system is a computer application for automatically identifying and verifying a person from a digital image or video frame from a video source.

There are three main ways in which facial recognition works:

Number One: Traditional
The traditional sense of facial recognition revolves around a camera extracting landmarks and features from a person’s face and comparing that to other known facial images. The manner in which this occurs is simply, the image taken is distilled into values. These values are then compared to facial values on record and the system pushes out the nearest match to these values..

Number Two: Three Dimensional Facial Recognition
This 3D facial scan captures a person’s entire face. The camera has a variety of sensors that pinpoint facial features and then ‘build’ a 3D model of your face. This recognition system works on pinpointing distinctive features such as eyes, nose and chin. The advantage of this system is that it operates with lasers and is therefore able to accurately generate a person’s face in different lighting.

Number Three: Skin Texture Analysis
This is an analysis of a person’s skin cells. A camera takes a shot of your face and focuses on the unique lines, patterns and non-visible spots on a person’s skin. This is then translated into a mathematical equation and looks for a match in the facial database. This feature is said to improve facial recognition by up to twenty-five percent.

Technical furniture systems enable control rooms the ability to make use of this additional feature to casino security. With constant surveillance required in casinos, the control room construction is based on ensuring all areas of the casino is visible, as well as all people in the casino.

Technical furniture is an important part of the control room design, as it provides the casino owners with the tools to prevent theft from happening. I’m Kenny Rogers – a self-confessed slot machine genius.