NEC Software Solutions chosen to provide Facial Recognition technology in support of a national policing capability
NEC Software Solutions UK Ltd (NEC) has been successful in securing a number of contracts following a further competition exercise via BlueLight Commercial’s recently established National Live Facial Recognition Framework. The contracts are to equip ten mobile facial recognition units, funded by the Home Office and the NPCC, that can be used by every territorial police force in England and Wales to support their policing needs.
The units will be based within 7 UK Police Forces and available to all forces on a mutual aid basis. NEC will equip them with all the necessary computing hardware along with NEC’s market-leading NeoFace Watch live facial recognition solution.
NeoFace Watch identifies wanted or vulnerable individuals in real-time by analysing the biometrics gathered by the cameras against a database constructed by the police force complying with authorised professional practice. The system will flag the probability of a match to supervising officers so that they are able to make the decision on any arrest or further action. Any biometrics of individuals not matched are immediately deleted.
Steve Ainsworth, Executive Director Public Safety, NEC says “This is a major step forward for UK Policing and we are delighted to be providing our technology to support it. Our technology has been tested and operationally proven, globally, to provide highly accurate and unbiased results and been in use by a number of UK Police forces for the past decade and we look forward to being able to support this new national capability.”
NeoFace is NEC’s high performance, highly scalable facial recognition algorithm, providing fast and accurate results for the most demanding real-time facial recognition use cases.
It’s designed to find a needle in a haystack, reducing a problem down to a much smaller review process. Built upon 40 years’ experience and world leading AI, it’s highly tolerant of ageing, angles, headwear and environmental factors such as lighting.
The algorithm has been independently tested by the NPL and performs consistently regardless of age, ethnicity and gender by combining the best feature-matching and AI technologies. Its built-in safeguards support privacy and proportionate use, with auditing and reporting as well as automatic and manual data retention tools.
Find out more information on NEC’s Biometrics and Facial Recognition solutions.
