Herta Security awarded by European Commission for biometric innovation to contain COVID-19

The European Commission has recognized Herta Security‘s crowd-monitoring system with real-time face biometrics and crowd behavior analysis with the “COVID-19 Response Seal of Excellence,” the company announced.

The new AWARE system was evaluated by the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Pilot, an initiative that provides European entrepreneurs the opportunity to receive funding for innovative ideas that can establish new markets. The focus is on SMEs with high growth and scalability potential.

In March, the call was made for technologies that could assist with COVID-19 relief efforts, whether it was treating, testing, monitoring or other aspects related to the pandemic.

Herta came up with AWARE as a hybrid edge and distributed system for advanced video analytics, biometric facial recognition and crowd behavior analytics. Deep Neural Network accelerator hardware would be used to process the data at the edge to reduce cost and boost deployment. Herta has recently upgraded its facial recognition algorithm to identify people when they wear masks, which is a critical feature during the pandemic.

Even though Herta Security received the COVID-19 Seal of Excellence award for its proposal, it will unfortunately not receive funding due to budget pressures.

Article Topics

behavioral biometrics  |  biometrics  |  biometrics at the edge  |  European Commission  |  facial recognition  |  Herta Security  |  monitoring  |  video analytics