NEC tech ranked No. 1 in NIST tests

NEC Corporation announced this month their facial recognition algorithm, NeoFace, was ranked top following the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) identification (1:n) evaluation published in September 2019, undertaken by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The news reflects NEC’s status as a world leader in facial recognition and AI technologies, following top placement in all previous major NIST evaluations including 2017’s Face In Video Evaluation (FIVE), 2013’s Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT), 2010’s Multi Biometric Evaluation (MBE) and 2009’s Multi-Biometric Grand Challenge (MBGC).

NeoFace led the way with an error rate of 0.5% when registering 12 million people. According to the PR announcement from NEC:

“49 organizations, including companies from the United States, China, Russia, Europe, and Japan, participated in the NIST’s FRVT 2018, where the evaluation of face recognition accuracy was performed. These tests are the most rigorous and fair benchmarks implemented by the NIST…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.”

Looking forward, NEC is firmly placed to expand the scope of their technology and provide solutions across a multitude of sectors and to a large variety of needs. For example, retail, public facilities, local transport, hospitals, social care and large events (such as festivals or sporting fixtures) will all benefit from face recognition and AI innovation.

NEC remains a leader in this technological market, delivering the world’s most accurate solution. We are going through a significant technology revolution, largely led by AI, and it will be fascinating to see where NEC takes their expertise to next.