Protecting critical infrastructure and the fan experience with biometric face recognition

Posted by Allen Ganz on September 21, 2017September 22, 2017 Posted in Biometrics, Education, Government, Hospitality, Retail Tagged biometric, critical infrastructure, face recognition, facial, neoface, public safety, stadiums

From concert halls to sports stadiums, nothing ruins an outing like a public safety incident. Whether it’s due to a fan’s reaction to an unpopular ruling on the field or a more intentional plot to inflict harm, when situations get out of control, the outcome is unpredictable and often dangerous.

Imagine a scuffle breaking out at a soccer match in a packed stadium, injuring not just members of the teams, but also innocent fans. Even worse, imagine the chaotic aftermath of the brutal bombing at the Arianna Grande concert in Manchester, UK. Preventing injuries and loss of life in incidents like these—not to mention identifying and helping apprehend the perpetrators—is critical.

What if the troublemakers at a soccer game could be identified before they are even admitted or seated? What if suspected terrorists could be recognized from live or recorded video feeds leveraging cameras at key chokepoints that don’t disrupt the flow and speed the security checks or even on crowded city streets?

NEC designed its NeoFace facial recognition solutions to address the critical security infrastructure needs of high-traffic venues like these. Web-based and easy-to-use, NeoFace has a scalable architecture and enterprise-class features that integrate and deploy with existing surveillance systems. Its high performance allows critical infrastructure to keep tens of thousands of sports fans safe, by accurately identifying the bad guys and alerting security personnel to help keep them out.

How advanced facial recognition helps cooler heads prevail

NeoFace works with video surveillance to check individuals against known watch lists and generates real-time alerts when positive matches are found. In a four-step process, it captures and extracts faces of individuals from video feeds, performs quality matches in real-time with unsurpassed accuracy and speed—handling up to 3.02 million searches per second.

It works like this:

Capture: Capture real-time from digital cameras, closed circuit television (CCTV) or archived footage.
Assess: Assess individual video frames, detect and analyze the unique facial signature of each face.
Match: Compare and match the signatures against a database which includes enrolled images of individuals.
React: Take a configurable action when a positive match is made.

Safe and secure, from front of house to back of house

There are hundreds more major concerts and sporting events scheduled worldwide throughout the rest of 2017. Unruly fans, unauthorized persons, and other persons-of-interest shouldn’t be allowed to ruin the thrill and excitement for others — and we don’t have to let them. With more than 100 years of expertise in technological innovation, NEC built NeoFace to provide critical infrastructure protection for venues like stadiums, making them safer and more secure.

Rapid identification eliminates long screening and admission queues. With NeoFace, VIP guests and season ticketholders can self-authenticate and enter in express lines and even pay-by-face for their concessions improving the customer experience, getting you back to the game quicker.

For back of house, NeoFace can protect employee, contractor and delivery entrances from unauthorized entry. NeoFace identifies known offenders on security watch lists and alerts security, before they can enter and cause harm.

Stay Tuned

Of course, concert and sports stadiums aren’t the only high-traffic venues where NEC solutions help keep the public safe. Watch this space for future posts on how NEC provides critical infrastructure for airports, cruise terminals, theme parks, transportation hubs and more.

Learn more about NEC’s Advanced Recognition Solutions

Fill out the form, and we’ll have a solutions expert reach out to you.

NEC Strengthens Its Biometrics Solution by Partnering with Expert Dr. Anil Jain

Posted by Kris Ranganath on April 7, 2016 Posted in Biometrics Tagged Anil Jain, biometrics, facial recognition, Michigan State University, NEC, NECAM, neoface

As a society, we’re increasingly comfortable with cameras being a part of everyday life. They’re built into our phones, hanging over every traffic light, and placed behind most cash registers. Still, for law enforcement, a perfect image of a face can be hard to come by, especially when suspects intentionally try to obscure their identity.

It was this issue that Dr. Anil Jain, distinguished professor of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University (MSU), set out to solve Using a database of unconstrained images – also known as “faces in the wild” because pictures are pulled from sources like social media – Dr. Jain and his team (Dr. Dayong Wang, a postdoctoral researcher, and Charles Otto, a doctoral student) created an algorithm that quickly generates a list of candidate matches to help identify unknown faces from surveillance camera footage or crime-scene images.

NEC recently partnered with Dr. Jain and MSU to license this large-scale face-search system and will use it to enhance its current facial recognition solutions.

“NEC has a very powerful face recognition software called NeoFace that was primarily designed for mug shot to mug shot matching,” said Dr. Jain, “and it has performed extremely well compared to its peers in that kind of scenario. So, they were looking for a solution for the problem where query images have rather large variability in terms of pose, illumination, and expression, and still need to be searched against large face databases.”

“NEC is committed to maintaining its leadership position in facial recognition solutions,” said Raffie Beroukhim, vice president, NECAM’s Biometrics Solutions Division. “In addition to our own continued research, partnerships with academia, in particular Michigan State University, is an important aspect of this commitment. We look forward to the fusion of MSU large-scale face-search algorithm with our industry-leading NeoFace facial algorithms to offer more compelling solutions to address ever-increasing security threats and enhance public and national security.”

“What we provided is a prototype,” said Dr. Jain. “NEC will modify the algorithm that we provided, integrate it with their existing systems, and improve the overall face recognition performance.”

Since joining MSU in 1974, Dr. Jain has received numerous recognitions for his contributions to the field of pattern recognition and biometrics, including his February 2016 election to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest professional distinctions bestowed on an engineer.

Interestingly, he didn’t set out to specialize in biometrics. His career took a turn when the U.S. government engaged Dr. Jain, about 25 years back, to find civilian applications for a government-designed hardware, the Splash 2 processor, that was based on FPGA technology.

“They didn’t tell me to work on biometrics, but the hardware that they provided us made us realize that it was extremely suitable for a generic image processing operation, called point matching, where we extract landmarks from two separate images and put them in correspondence or alignment. And since fingerprint matching is done by using point (minutia) correspondence … it was like serendipity.”

For years, biometrics was primarily used for law enforcement and government applications. Over the past five years or so, we’re seeing more consumer applications of biometrics. We use fingerprints to unlock smartphones. There’s even a facial recognition application that can estimate a subject’s age and gender for targeted advertisements. According to Dr. Jain, the rise of biometrics in our everyday lives has had an element of serendipity as well – where market forces have had to align with high usability and low cost to facilitate adoption.

“Who would have imagined just four years ago that everybody would be using a fingerprint to unlock their phones? Biometrics for mobile devices had been available earlier, but it didn’t really become popular until Apple introduced the Touch ID fingerprint sensor in 2013. This shows that sometimes, even though the technology may be ready, the technology doesn’t lift off unless it’s packaged properly – like Apple putting the fingerprint sensor in the home button.”

Dr. Jain and his doctoral students continue to use their research laboratory to investigate real-world issues and address long-standing research problems. In addition to the large-scale face-search system, recent topics include a study on the persistence of fingerprint recognition accuracy over time and methods to prevent printed photo and replay attacks on a face recognition system.

“We’re really proud of the work we did on fingerprint persistence and face spoof detection because these fundamental problems needed to be answered,” said Dr. Jain. “And these are the issues that need to be addressed for every biometric modality. The impact of the problem is what we keep in mind when we choose which topic to work on. Sometimes, more than technology advancement, we take pleasure in advancing fundamental scientific work.”

NEC is proud to collaborate with visionary leaders like Dr. Jain. NEC already has one of the strongest biometrics offerings available, and as we continue our own research and forge partnerships with biometric leaders, the future of biometrics is something to look forward to.

Warning Calgary Criminals: You Can Run…But You Can No Longer Hide!

Posted by Bryan Williams on December 15, 2014February 19, 2015 Posted in Straight Talk Tagged biometrics, calgary, calgary police service, canada, criminal photos, facial recognition, law enforcement, NEC, NECAM, neoface, neoscan, police, reveal

Every day, members of law enforcement risk their lives and spend long, grueling hours trying to catch criminals. They make these sacrifices to protect law-abiding citizens, so shouldn’t they be provided with useful technology that would aid them in their investigations?

Calgary Police Service: Investigative Experts Choose NeoFace®

Recently, the City of Calgary (Canada) and the Calgary Police Service (CPS) made the conscious choice to enhance their investigative capability by choosing NeoFace® Reveal facial recognition software. This decision did not come without a rigorous review process of multiple face recognition-based criminal identification systems, but nothing less should be expected from investigative experts.

The implementation of NeoFace Reveal will reduce investigation times and lighten the caseloads through more efficient methods of analyzing images. Additionally, quicker identifications inform investigators of a criminal’s identity immediately following a crime, thus preventing the criminal from gaining a significant head start while fleeing. CPS will be able to confidently solve higher volumes of crime in a much more timely and efficient manner. Ultimately, this facial recognition solution gives the Calgary Police Service a valuable tool to serve public safety and security needs.

View Demo:

Bio-Metrics | Life-To Measure

Some may wonder…what is biometrics exactly? Simply, it is the study of identifying and verifying individuals based on their physical characteristics. Not so simply, it includes a person’s recognition through biological measurements such as their fingerprints, voice, DNA, the iris of the eye, hair and facial features.

These are but a few examples of characteristics that police departments use to verify and identify persons of interest. The sphere of the characteristics used in law enforcement investigations expands to more specific kinds of measurements, although facial characteristics can be examined and identified much quicker than the other factors. NEC recognizes the importance and usefulness of facial recognition, and through years of experience has developed NeoFace Reveal into a go-to resource for law enforcement.

NeoFace, Revealed!

Facial recognition techniques have existed for some time, but NEC has perfected the process through advanced technology. Investigators are able to process and analyze images rapidly and with unsurpassed accuracy and matching speed. Standard imaging enhancements, such as crop/rotate, brightness, contrast, intensity, smooth, sharpen, histogram equalization, noise reduction, aspect ratio correction, and de-interlacing, are combined with additional highly developed processing methods that allow for superior image quality and matching ability.

NeoFace advanced enhancements include:

· Pose correction on off-centered images improves facial matching score

· Consolidation of multiple images creates the most accurate frontal face image

· Illumination allows correction of shadows from off-center light sources

The images acquired during an investigation do not always provide law enforcement with the clear-cut evidence or positive identification needed in an investigation. Whether the image is too dark or taken at the wrong angle, a number of potential things can slow down an investigation. NeoFace easily addresses these issues. Poor quality images, outdated criminal photos, or images that appear to be unusable are no longer setbacks associated with facial recognition technology when using NeoFace Reveal.

For more information on NeoFace, visit our web site where you can find more information on this solution as well as case studies and white papers. We are proud to serve law enforcement by providing solutions for society that help keep us safe.