NEC Corporation today declared that its IRIS recognition technology ranked first in the world in the most recent iris recognition technology benchmark test, IREX 10, connected by the globally authoritative U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In this bench mark test, the technology was evaluated with an accuracy rate of 99.5% for “1: N Identification” for images including both among half a million people.
NEC also positioned first in the NIST IRIS recognition benchmark test in 2018, as well as the face recognition benchmark test results published in August 2021. In recent years, NEC has capitalized on its leading artificial intelligence (AI) to strengthen the performance of its IRIS recognition technology against images with deteriorated quality that often occur in practical situations. This has resulted in a significant improvement in the error rate when compared to previous technologies.
NEC plans to use this technology for “walkthrough” IRIS recognition and in combination with face recognition in order to provide highly accurate multimodal biometric authentication. Multimodal biometrics provides high precision results even when face masks caps are worn, and support maintenance of hygienic environments with contactless identification.
As these technologies support safe and secure living, NEC anticipates they will used throughout a variety of applications, including payment at stores, access to facilitates, such as data centers that requires high security management, as well as food and pharmaceutical plants, clean rooms, and medical sites that demand strict hygiene control. NEC will capitalize on its portfolio of biometric identification solutions, ‘Bio-Idiom’, which includes face recognition technologies, and ‘NEC the WISE’, the company’s cutting-edge AI technologies, such as video analytics, in order to expand their use for Fin Tech, digital IDs and more.
