Facedeals uses facial recognition to personalize offers and discounts

Applying specific discounts based on a person's preferences is nothing new. Various smartphone and Facebook applications help facilitate these operations, but a new application in testing phase developed by the Redpepper agency is taking this technology one step further, experimenting with offers in restaurants and stores using cameras and facial recognition.

Redpepper, a Nashville-based advertising agency (Tennessee, EU) has developed a pilot system that allows Facebook users to register at a commercial location using facial recognition technology to obtain personalized benefits in establishments. Facedeals involves installing cameras with facial recognition software in businesses. With user permission, They recognize your face and verify that you are in the premises. At the same time, a message on your smartphone notifies you of an offer, a personalized discount or special promotion based on your taste history as a customer.

Users will need to have authorized the Facedeals application through their Facebook account. The application checks the most recent photo tags of said user on the popular social network and records the biometric data of their face. This information is then used to identify you in the real world..

Customers could activate the application from their profile so that local businesses know if the user has liked their fan page or is a frequent customer. If the client forgets to check-in with their smartphone at a certain location, a camera will do it for them, recognizing their faces based on photographs from their Facebook profile. They do not use Facebook recognition technology, supplied by Face.com.
Facedeals cameras have been developed with open source technologies including Raspberry Pi, Arduino, OpenCV and the Facebook Graph API. They only need a power supply and a Wi-Fi connection.

Facedeals is currently being beta tested and a Redpepper representative has stated: “Registries provide an effective mechanism for companies to offer discounts to loyal customers.”, but few companies and even fewer customers are taking advantage of this, so we set out to develop the registration process by creating a transparent method to get discounts”.

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