NEC facial biometrics secure the LPGA, identifies Australian WW1 soldiers

After the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tournament series in the U.S. was postponed due to coronavirus concerns, Mike Whan, the association’s commissioner has announced a partnership with NEC to install biometric facial recognition scanning in the headquarters, reports Wtol.

All people entering the building will be screened and have their temperature taken. If the person is not recognized or an abnormal temperature is detected, the door does not open. Whan’s plan is to use the technology for the Symetra Tour, the LPGA, and the Ladies European Tour. For now, it will be used in northwest Ohio to run multiple tests per week on players.

Identify unknown WW1 soldiers

NEC’s facial recognition technology was recently used in a two-day trial by the Australian War Memorial (AWM) to identify unknown soldiers from the Western Front in Northern France during World War I, the company said.

About 4,000 images were used, taken by the Thuillier family who lived in Vignacourt, on glass negatives in 1916, and found in a wooden chest. Some of the images were bought by an Australian philanthropist who donated them to the museum, but until now the people in the images could not be identified. The selection is known as the “Vignacourt” or “Thuillier” Collection.

NEC Australia used NeoFace Watch to cross match 718 images against two other War Memorial photographic databases, and found 1,388 matches. The War Memorial identified matches with at least an 80 percent similarity score.

“NEC was honored to be invited to join the AWM in this really worthwhile project,” said David Borean, Executive General Manager of NEC’s Brand and Customer Experience Division, in a prepared statement. “The dedicated research team at the AWM has spent many hours working to manually identify Diggers from the Vignacourt collection over almost a decade against other collections it had in its archives. So, to be able to help them identify previously unknown soldiers in a matter of hours was a thrill for us as an organization and a testament to what NEC’s modern solutions can do, potentially in the national interest,” Borean added.

Article Topics

access control  |  Australia  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  fever detection  |  NEC  |  NeoFace