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Feasibility study on the development of LipVerify - a new viseme based user authentication service.

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LipVerify (Feasibility study on the development of LipVerify - a new viseme based user authentication service.)

Reporting period: 2016-07-01 to 2016-12-31

Liopa’s goal is to deliver a convenient, robust and secure biometric authentication solution, which will be accessible for every smart connected device. Specifically, our technology can verify a user’s identity by analysing the appearance and movement of their lips as they speak into a camera. The user is challenged to say a randomly chosen word or phrase each time they are authenticated. This allows our technology to not only accurately verify identity, but also ensure, that the person is actually present (“liveness”) and therefore the biometric data is not being falsified. Liopa’s technology enables a number of use cases including:

• Prevention of theft and fraud in online and mobile commerce
• online and mobile banking authentication
• Physical Access Security, Time and Attendance Management
• Securing access to Mobile Devices & Applications
• Authentication for Corporate mobile workforce

The company has been spun out from the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) at Queen’s University Belfast with the objective of further developing and commercializing the research carried out within the university in the field of biometrics.

The main objectives of this project where to (1) undertake a detailed scoping analysis of a commercialized solution (known as LipVerify) (2) prototype some of the main elements of LipVerify & implement it in an external test environment (3) qualify and quantify the market for the technology and develop a full business plan for commercialization.
The outcome of the project can be summarized by the following main conclusions:

1. Prototype: The prototype development and test demonstrated that the core elements of the R&D could be exploited within a “real world” environment.
2. Market: deeper market research has verified that several of the use cases previously identified are realistic targets for LipVerify and feasible routes to market exist.
3. Business Case: A detailed study of the costs required to develop a commercial version of LipVerify, along with solid market sizing data gained and data based estimation of product pricing has shown that the business case for LipVerify is very positive.

In summary the outcome of the project was highly positive and Liopa is now investigating required steps to move into a full commercialization phase.
The project has demonstrated that LipVerify has some unique characteristic when compared with existing biometric authentication techniques e.g. strong liveness detection and no requirement for specialist hardware to implement it. As such LipVerify represents an important step forward in biometric authentication technology and potential to impact across multiple domains and also the majority of EU citizens using online applications.

The prospect of using LipVerify as a low cost and easy to deploy alternative to passwords could have a widespread impact on EU citizens by offering a higher level of security while vastly improving the user experience.
Lip analysis snap shot