NEC’s Face Tech Achieves Top Score in NIST Testing

Biometrics News – Facial Recognition

NEC’s facial recognition algorithm has achieved the top score in the the NIST’s 2018 Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT). The company’s platform had the highest accuracy, performing 230 million matches per second to pair faces at a rate that was significantly better than the next closest competitor.

The FRVT 2018 test evaluated solutions from 49 different organizations. In addition to besting the other 48 companies in the accuracy department, NEC’s solution had an error rate that was four times lower than the closest competitor when performing a match of a subject after a ten-year interval.

“NEC’s face recognition technology is critical to the ways that NEC is helping to build safer and more productive societies,” said NEC Fellow Hitoshi Imaoka. “These technologies create new value by sharing information on the status of communities, things, and processes across the entire value chain.”

This is the fifth time that NEC technology has placed first in a round of NIST testing. The company last accomplished the feat in 2017, building on the success that began with its previous top performance in 2014.

Imaoka went on to explain that NEC’s facial recognition is integral to the company’s smart city ambitions. The company recently partnered with BlackRidge to improve the security of its platform, and previously provided facial recognition surveillance cameras to police in the city of Gurugram in India.

The rest of NEC’s biometric technology has also performed well in NIST testing. In the past few years, the company has received top marks for its iris recognition and fingerprint recognition solutions, which are also available as part of a comprehensive biometric portfolio.

–

October 3, 2019 – by Eric Weiss