NEC Gets Top Ranking in Latest NIST Facial Recognition Test

NEC’s facial recognition technology has once again come in first in National Institute of Standards and Technology testing.

The company’s technology attained the top ranking in NIST’s most recent Face in Video Evaluation, or FIVE, testing, which assesses the performance of technologies designed to capture in real time the facial biometrics of walking subjects. In one test based on scanning individuals as they pass through an airport gate without acknowledging the camera, NIST’s technology bested its rivals with an accuracy rate of 99.2 percent; in another designed to scan the face of a suspicious individual deep in a crowd, and who is constantly changing direction, NIST says its system attained an error rate only half as high as the nearest competitor.

NEC’s latest FIVE ranking complements previous wins in the 2009 Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge, the 2010-2011 Multiple Biometrics Evaluation, and the 2013 Face Recognition Vendor Test. In a statement, NEC SVP Masakazu Yamashina said, “It is a great honor that our face recognition technology received a first place evaluation for the fourth consecutive time” in NIST testing.

The results were outlined in NIST’s Interagency Report 8173: Face in Video Evaluation (FIVE) Face Recognition of Non-Cooperative Subjects.

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March 16, 2017 – by Alex Perala