Rio de Janeiro Gets Face-based Fare Payment, Care of Cognitec

Rio de Janeiro is implementing a face-based fare payment system, and Dresden-based Cognitec Systems has been tapped to provide the biometric technology. The system will operate through a mobile transportation app called “Jaé”, which reportedly has about four million daily users.

Cognitec says about 11,000 biometric capture devices have now been installed through the city’s transportation system. Interested commuters can register via the app, and the biometric devices will use facial recognition to match them to their tickets.

The system has been implemented in collaboration with Billingpay, a Rio-based software and IT services company. Billingpay CCO Marcello Perrotta asserted in a statement that Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second-largest city, “now operates one of the most modern and secure ticketing systems in the world.”

The biometric technology is certainly state of the art. In the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s latest 1:N report from its ongoing Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE), Cognitec attained a rank-one identification rate of 98.7 percent in the visa-like immigration application photos dataset. This means that the correct match was often the first suggestion in Cognitec’s evaluation.

The company also demonstrated over 97 percent accuracy in identifying individuals even with images taken several years apart.

Commenting on the Rio de Janeiro transportation deployment, Cognitec Managing Director Alfredo Herrera called it a “testament to the countless capabilities of face recognition technologies for modern identification services.”

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July 22, 2024 – by Alex Perala