NEC Corporation of Japan has announced that its face recognition technology achieved the highest matching accuracy in the Face Recognition Vendor Test 2018 performed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with an error rate of 0.5% when registering 12 million people.

This rating was the fifth time for NEC following its top placement in the face recognition testing for video in 2017.

The growing convenience of biometric authentication technology, improved security awareness, and the remarkable development of artificial intelligence (AI), have driven companies around the world to begin adopting biometric authentication technology.

Specifically, the use of face recognition technology is rapidly expanding across a wide range of fields throughout the world. Face recognition technologies are now being used in areas that require high reliability, convenience and long-term use, such as identity verification and national infrastructure, transaction settlements, bank account establishment and passport verification.

“NEC’s portfolio of biometric identification solutions, ‘Bio-Idiom,’ which includes face recognition technology, is critical to the ways that NEC is helping to build safer and more productive societies as part of the ‘NEC Value Chain Innovation’,” said Hitoshi Imaoka, NEC, Fellow at NEC Corporation, in a statement.

Forty-nine organisations, including companies from the United States, China, Russia, Europe, and Japan, participated in the NIST’s 2018, where the evaluation of face recognition accuracy was performed.

By performing multi-stage matching, an impressive search speed of 230 million matchings per second was achieved. Furthermore, leveraging NEC's deep learning methods to significantly reduce the identification error rate, NEC accurately matched images of a subject taken over a 10 year interval with an error rate that was 4 times lower than the runner-up.

NEC aims to further expand the scope of this technology’s application to include store transaction settlements, services in public facilities, such as buses, railways, airports, city offices and hospitals and in helping to protect and care for children and the elderly.

“These technologies create new value by sharing information on the status of communities, things, and processes across the entire value chain, and are a meaningful source of growth in our Mid-term Management Plan 2020 and ‘NEC Safer Cities,’ which support the realization of safe, secure, efficient, and equal cities,” Imaoka said.

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