NEC launches faster real-time face recognition solution The latest edition of NeoFace Watch identifies known suspects from high speed, low resolution CCTV cameras to help police and security personnel to create safer cities

London, April 21, 2015 - NEC Corporation (TSE: NEC 6701) today announced that it will launch the latest edition of NeoFace Watch at Counter Terror Expo 2015 in London on 21-22 April 2015. NeoFace Watch can identify known suspects from live CCTV footage, as well as from prerecorded video and still image photo databases. This latest version introduces significant performance enhancements to improve the speed of processing to 30 frames per second of real-time video and is able to handle very large databases.

 

NeoFace Watch integrates with existing video surveillance systems and matches faces in real-time against a watch list of individuals to trigger an alert for police and security professionals. Independent testing confirms that NEC’s NeoFace technology provides the fastest, most accurate matching capability and is most able to deal with poor quality images typically found in CCTV footage and also variations caused by ageing, race and pose angle. NEC’s face recognition technology achieved the highest performance evaluation for the third consecutive time in the recent Face Recognition Vendor Test 2014 performed by the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

 

NEC’s solution captures images in real time, selects areas of the face with dense information values — such as the curves of the eye socket, nose and chin — and uses advanced pattern recognition models to identify the subject. NeoFace’s strength lies in its tolerance of poor quality, highly compressed live and archived CCTV video footage, leading to higher rates of positive identification. It’s able to identify a match with image resolutions down to just 24 pixels between the eyes. This makes NeoFace Watch a good fit in a city with various types of camera systems already in place. The application is a web-based thin client with an easy-to-use user interface.

 

NEC's biometric technology is used in 40 countries worldwide for fighting crime, preventing fraud and improving public safety. NeoFace Watch has been deployed across EMEA, the Asia Pacific region, North America, and Latin America.

 

Chris de Silva, VP Public Safety and Head of Global Face Recognition Solutions Business at NEC, commented, “NEC’s face recognition solutions are part of a globally-trusted portfolio of biometric and safer cities solutions. The speed of our face detection and match accuracy is unmatched by any competing solution and we can easily demonstrate that NeoFace Watch can handle poor quality images better and faster than any other system. Our public safety solutions include multimodal biometrics, situation awareness and cybersecurity solutions.”

 

For more information, visit our global Safer Cities reports, including a new 2015 index of the safest cities around the world at: http://safecities.economist.com

 

 

Note to editors

To find out about the algorithms NEC uses in its face recognition solutions and how they were developed, visit: http://bit.ly/1Iz6HB5

 

About NEC Corporation

NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. By providing a combination of products and solutions that cross utilize the company’s experience and global resources, NEC’s advanced technologies meet the complex and ever-changing needs of its customers. NEC brings more than 100 years of expertise in technological innovation to empower people, businesses and society. For more information, visit NEC at http://www.nec.com.

 

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