What Is Facial Recognition?

Modern facial recognition systems work by extracting a mathematical representation of facial features — a face embedding — and comparing it against a database of known embeddings. Identification systems check whether a face matches any stored identity; verification systems check whether two faces belong to the same person. ScanErase uses a verification approach: comparing the embedding extracted from your reference photo against embeddings indexed from public and platform content to find matching faces. The process requires no law enforcement access and returns results only for the specific face you provided.

Key facts about this term

1. Facial recognition extracts mathematical features, not the image itself The recognition process works with numerical representations (embeddings) of facial geometry — not the original image. This makes the search privacy-preserving and efficient at scale.
2. Accuracy depends on reference photo quality A clear, front-facing, well-lit photograph provides the best face embedding for accurate matching. Blurry, heavily filtered, or profile-only photos produce less accurate embeddings.
3. ScanErase does not build a persistent facial database Your face embedding is created at scan time and used for that scan only. ScanErase does not maintain a database of user biometrics between sessions.