Moscow police piloting AR glasses with Ntechlab facial recognition tech

Feb 24, 2019 | Stephen Mayhew

Moscow’s Department of Information Technology is testing augmented reality glasses that feature facial recognition technology developed by Ntechlab, RBC reports.

Ntechlab facial recognition algorithms have been a top performer on the NIST Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Ongoing and the company’s FindFace solution has performed comparably to Google in a past University of Washington’s MegaFace competition.

This pilot project will link the glasses to a database of individuals wanted by the police and will have access to footage from 1,500 surveillance cameras in the Russian capital. According to RBC sources, Ntechlab demonstrated the application with glasses by Epson on an Android OS at a security industry forum in Moscow this month. A public presentation of the technology is expected to happen at Interpolitech in October.

In 2017, Moscow upgraded its public surveillance system by adding Ntechlab facial recognition technology to the network of CCTV cameras installed across the city. Facial recognition algorithms are now used on 1,500 cameras that are connected to databases of wanted persons of operational interest for law enforcement.

RBC notes that of the 167,000 cameras deployed in the city, 100,000 are at entrances and 20,000 in the yards of residential buildings that 16,000 city officials have access to. The Head of the City Video Surveillance Department of Moscow DIT Dmitry Golovin has said that in the future, most of these cameras will be connected to the face recognition system.

Smart city projects are expected to be a major driver in the global facial recognition market’s growth to nearly $15 billion annually by 2026.