Japanese companies identify facial recognition opportunity in conflict between U.S. and China

China’s facial recognition unicorns have received a lot of hype, but conflict between China and the U.S. and unease about China’s surveillance industry in many markets represents a window of opportunities for Japanese biometric facial recognition providers, and NEC in particular, Nikkei Asian Review reports.

The report notes that Chinese companies have been racing up the rankings in accuracy and scaling out deployments, but NEC’s technology, in development since 1989, has topped recent NIST rankings, and now the company has developed a facial recognition system leveraging quantum cryptography, which is said to be virtually unhackable, jointly with Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

The description, with data divided and stored in separate nodes, sounds like something Biometric Update has previously heard referred to as “sharding.”

This may appeal to more security and privacy-conscious markets, though the article also notes Chinese suppliers have made inroads in emerging markets with low-cost facial recognition.

Panasonic, another Japanese company providing facial biometrics, launched a pay-as-you-go cloud-based facial recognition service in November.

Nikkei notes that Indian market research firm Mordor Intelligence has forecast the global facial recognition market will double to $9.1 billion from 2018 to 2024.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  China  |  encryption  |  facial recognition  |  Japan  |  NEC  |  United States  |  video surveillance