Page 7 - GCN, August/September 2018

Face off: Biometric rally tests facial recognition algorithms
BY SARA FRIEDMAN
To help vendors improve their facial recognition technology, the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate recently held an event in which
11 technology providers competed against one another to determine whose technology best meets DHS’ needs.
In the 2018 Biometric Technology Rally, NEC and Gemalto — which participated under code names Crestone and Castle, respectively — had the highest scores for efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction.
Rally participants were given approximately 3,000 photos of about 300 people in a scenario designed to approximate people passing through a facial recognition checkpoint at an airport. Contestants were measured on average transaction time, failure rate in acquiring or processing an image, percent of satisfied customers and the effectiveness of providing the correct identity in a given time interval.
For the competition, NEC tested its NeoFace Express. Customs and Border Protection is using the technology in pilot implementations of its Traveler Verification Service, which compares photos of international travelers captured by CBP at airports with visa photos and passport images associated with flight manifests.
Benji Hutchinson, vice president of federal operations
in NEC’s Advanced Recognition Systems Division, said the DHS event helped the company see how its technology stacks up against the competition and what the government wants in a solution.
“We see these government-funded testing efforts as a good indicator of how the technology that we build and field is being received by different parts of the federal government,” Hutchinson said. “In this case, DHS S&T generated some interesting metrics to measure the market participants.”
Gemalto tested its Live Face Identification System during the rally. It matches photos of individuals to surveillance photos taken in public places such as sports arenas, railway stations and airports.
“In a video surveillance situation, you are looking for people who you have already determined that you want
to make sure that they don’t go into a certain facility,” said Neville Pattinson, Gemalto’s senior vice president for federal
government sales. “You are looking for the exceptions to normal activity.”
In a one-to-one testing environment, the companies had a failure rate of less than 1 percent in acquiring images within 20 seconds.
The 2018 Biometric Technology Rally was DHS’ first experiment in testing technology solutions against one another, but more rallies are planned to inform future applications of the technology to the needs of DHS’ component agencies. •
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PHOTOS: DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY