Not even twins can fool Window 10’s facial recognition

Windows Hello is a feature that Microsoft implemented in Windows 10 that allows users to sign-in to their computer using facial recognition. It’s an interesting feature that everyone has been scrambling to find a weakness for, but it looks like Hello is pretty damn good at what it does because not only can it distinguish between two similar looking people, it can even tell the difference between identical twins. 

One of the myriad benefits of Microsoft’s new Windows 10 operating systems is the ability to sign in with just your face via a system called Windows Hello. And now we know, thanks to The Australian, that similar-looking faces — even twins — can’t fool the system’s biometric security. In a not-entirely-scientific test, the online news organization enlisted the help of The Australian Twins Registry to find some losely matched twin pairs and then put them in front of Windows 10 machines. Windows 10 cannot, by itself, identify faces. You must have a computer equipped with Intel’s RealSense 3D camera technology, which is actually three image technologies: a conventional camera, an infrared camera, and an infrared laser projector. The combination of the three, Intel claims, lets the computer see the world more like humans do. As for how well it can identify faces, earlier this year Microsoft claimed a 1-in-100,000 false accept rate.