Telecom Lead America: NEC Corporation of America announced its NeoFace Facial Recognition Software solution achieved high accuracy in an independent study conducted by Michigan State University (MSU).
The software was able to identify a suspect from the recent Boston Marathon Bombing in the same study that simulated the post-bombing forensic work.
The study was conducted to examine the reliability of automated facial recognition (AFR) software to assist law enforcement in identifying suspects in a simulation of the forensic work done after the Boston Bombings.
Media reports of the post-Boston Bombing investigation created a common perception that facial recognition technology is not always reliable because it apparently was not a factor in identifying the suspects. The published results of the MSU study challenge this perception.
In the MSU simulation, researchers used actual law enforcement video from the bombing and searched it against a background database of 1 million law enforcement booking images. They found that the NEC NeoFace product produced a “rank one” identification—a match—of suspect number two.
“As conditions in the study were simulated to be representative of actual crime scene situations, including the limited, poor quality images available to the investigators of the Boston Marathon Bombings, the strong performance of the NEC solution is significant,” said Raffie Beroukhim, vice president of NEC’s Biometrics Solutions Division.
The MSU study found that the NEC NeoFace solution consistently registered highly accurate facial matching scores in the study’s simulation.
