NeoFace is watching you

Face to face: Andrew Lee (right) and Keith Raderschadt demonstrating NeoFace Reveal at the Public Safety & Internal Security Asia 2014 exhibition in Kuala Lumpur.

NEC Corporation of Malaysia introduced a ­technology at the Public Safety & Internal Security Asia 2014 ­exhibition known as NeoFace, a facial ­recognition solution that the ­company claims is more ­reliable and accurate than competing ­solutions in the market today.

It’s split into two products — NeoFace Reveal and Watch. Reveal is primarily meant to be used by law enforcement officials as an investigation system while Watch is a surveillance system for companies such as casinos and banks.

Reveal is a latent face ­recognition tool for use in ­forensics — it ­matches faces obtained from a ­variety of sources, such as ­individual video frames from security cameras and uses that information to match faces from a database.

According to Keith Raderschadt, NeoFace account manager for the Biometrics Solutions division of NEC Corporation of America, Reveal is able to create a 3D model of a face by combining video frames from various angles.

This is important because ­database files usually contain ­images of people from a front view.

Raderschadt says that NeoFace is currently being used by various enforcement agencies in the United States, including the New York Police Department and Chicago Police Department as well as by various casinos as an investigation tool.

It has been able to reliably match faces even with low-resolution images, and can do so even when dealing with large databases such as the one used by the police, which has information on over 30 million people.

Reveal is also used by commercial companies like Internet-based image publishing service Shutterfly which uses the face matching technology to help find particular faces in its large database of photos.

Watch, on the other hand, uses the same face recognition ­technology, but applies it to video surveillance.

Using Watch, companies can set up a system which ­recognises ­individual faces in video ­surveillance footage.

It can be installed in existing video surveillance systems and can be used, amongst other things, to create watch lists in different ­categories so that different faces will trigger different alerts.

Apart from simply identifying possible criminals, for example, a casino can use it to recognise VIP patrons.

Andrew Lee, managing ­director of NEC Malaysia said that the ­company is currently in talks with the local enforcement agencies as well as private companies with a view to implement NeoFace in their systems.

Lee says that pricing is very much dependant on the type of ­integration required and the amount of work involved in setting up the system.

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www.nec.com.sg