Biometrics Leadership Profile: NEC

A Biometrics Industry Pioneer

The principal subsidiary of global IT solutions provider NEC, NEC Corporation of America offers a multitude of products and services across a range of fields. The company’s solutions span across diverse areas including data networking, energy storage, microwave radio, cloud data management, and much more.

Operating for over a century, NEC has more than 110,000 employees worldwide, and over 64,000 patents. That might make NEC sound like a jack of all trades, but in the domain of biometrics, the company has demonstrated substantial expertise and established itself as a true industry leader, thanks in large part to the company’s renowned NeoFace facial recognition technology.

How NEC’s NeoFace is Making an Impact

NEC’s sophisticated face biometrics technology has repeatedly earned top rankings in official testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and its accuracy, speed, and overall effectiveness have opened the door to a range of applications and high-profile deployments:

Airport Screening: One of the most impactful areas in which NEC’s biometric technology is being deployed is in passenger screening at airports, and this is especially true in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, NEC Corporation of America won a major contract to provide screening technology to all five of Hawaii’s major airports, and not only in the form of facial recognition. Rather, NEC’s biometric technology has been paired with temperature detection in a contactless passenger screening solution that can automatically detect the elevated temperatures that may signal viral infection.

Meanwhile, the company’s new I:Delight solution is starting to be adopted by airlines involved in the Star Alliance, and could lead to further deployments by NEC Corporation of America in the near future.

Border Control: NEC’s biometric technology is also making an impact at U.S. borders. Along the southern border with Mexico, authorities are using NEC’s NeoFace technology to match travelers to their passports, speeding up the screening process while automatically flagging imposters.

Law Enforcement: NEC offers a number of facial recognition solutions designed to meet the needs of law enforcement agencies. These include the NeoFace Reveal workstation for criminal investigations, the NeoFace Watch solution for real-time biometric surveillance, and NeoFace SMART ID mobile solution for identification in the field, among others.

Physical Access, Retail, and More: In addition to its activities in the highly sensitive areas of airport screening and border control, NEC has explored a number of other areas in which its biometric technology can foster innovative transformation. From facilitating a unique visitor experience at the National Soccer Hall of Fame to offering personalized in-store marketing for shoppers in a retail environment, NEC’s tech has the potential to reach across a wide swath of daily life for Americans.

Beyond Face Biometrics

While NEC has been winning acclaim for its facial recognition technology, its biometric portfolio also includes other modalities, particularly its solutions for law enforcement and government agencies.

Its NeoScan 45 mobile fingerprint scanner, for example, being used by ICE in its efforts to detect illegal aliens. Its SmartScan kiosk, meanwhile, supports not only fingerprint recognition but also palm print and iris scanning, as well as facial recognition.

Likewise, NEC Corporation of America’s Integra-ID Integrated Biometrics Workstation is designed to offer quick and reliable biometric identification via fingerprint, palm, face, and iris biometrics; and the Integra-ID Archive data repository solution has multimodal capabilities as well.

And while these additional biometric solutions have proven particularly popular in the government and law enforcement sectors, they – and their core biometric technologies – offer applications across a vast array of additional areas, from enterprise security to healthcare.

An Ongoing Ascent

In offering so many technologically sophisticated solutions across such a wide variety of application areas, it’s no wonder that NEC Corporation of America has established itself as a leader in the biometrics industry. And given its track record and the ongoing dynamism at the company, it’s clear that its range of solutions – and its reach across various sectors – will only continue to expand from here.

NEC’s new I:Delight solution offers a compelling case in point. While it’s currently making its ascent in passenger processing at airports in collaboration with the Star Alliance, it’s poised to find new use cases in the post-pandemic future, as NEC Corporation of America’s Vice President of Aviation, Jason Van Sice, explained in a recent interview with FindBiometrics.

“Not only do we strive to provide a streamlined customer experience, but we also envision offering secure payment transactions in countless environments, including travel, retail, hospitality, sporting events, financial services, offices, healthcare, and education,” he said. “The investment in digital transformation technologies can provide even richer capabilities, such as AI, computer vision, crowd, and access management. Our platform is raising expectations for the new normal and full recovery.”

Learn more about NEC Corporation of America by visiting its page on The FindBiometrics Directory.

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