The development of facial recognition technology is growing at an amazing pace. Glass is, in fact, one of the core materials in the progress of modern systems. A recent paper published by the University of Wisconsin–Madison highlights the advances in this field with their “smart” glass that can recognize images without any sensors or power sources.

“We’re using optics to condense the normal setup of cameras, sensors and deep neural networks into a single piece of thin glass,” says one of the researchers. This progress is very important as today’s artificial intelligence consumes substantial computational resources and battery power every time you unlock your phone with face ID. The team believes that the new glass promises to recognize faces without using any power at all.

The true power of this technology lies in its ability to handle much more complex classification tasks without any energy consumption. These tasks are the key to create artificial intelligence such as teaching driverless cars to recognize a traffic signal, enabling voice control in consumer devices, among numerous other examples.

The team’s system is particularly suitable for large data sets that are now reviewed manually and can potentially be extended to machine vision applications other than facial recognition.