AnyVision executives on making facial biometrics for touchless access control easier for the enterprise

AnyVision has brought its facial recognition and biometric liveness technology to the touchless access control market with the launch of a new enterprise solution to general availability. With large businesses around the world resuming operation, company executives told Biometric Update that the touchless access control capability of AnyVision’s technology is the top priority for its partners and customers, just ahead of remote authentication.

The solution provides secure and frictionless touchless entry screening with all of the regular features of AnyVision’s facial recognition, like biometric liveness and accuracy with people wearing masks. It also includes intelligent quadrant control and a granular rules engine.

AnyVision Chief Marketing Officer Adam Devine wrote in an email that the need to capture a still frontal face image is a big challenge for facial recognition-based access control solutions.

“Many existing solutions require the user to stop and engage with the system, which creates entry bottlenecks and compromises customer experience,” Devine writes. “AnyVision’s Touchless Access Control provides what we believe to be the fastest recognition in the industry, beginning the recognition process 3 meters away so that a user doesn’t have to break stride at the point of entry.”

Devine said in a call along with Vice President of Sales, North America, Brian Krause, that AnyVision’s solution is designed to scale across “multiple doors, multiple buildings, multiple states, multiple countries. It’s got a unique centralizing capability.”

Devine mentions transit hubs and airports, commercial real estate, and financial services in the email. Krause adds colleges, and says the company has been in talks with professional sports organizations and stadium operators. AnyVision says its system deploys rapidly and reliably. Krause says enterprises are not just deploying new systems, but also expanding existing systems, which can be an opportunity to adopt touchless biometrics.

“You might have had customers that have certain areas that are secure, and now everything in their environment is now permission-based and secure,” Krause says.

Beyond AnyVision’s biometric performance, the work the company has put into making it work for enterprises, with the IP cameras and software they already have, is a differentiator, according to Krause.

“You don’t get customers that have hundreds of sites, dozens of sites, tens of thousands of employees, that don’t run the big enterprise systems,” he points out.

The company began beta testing with select partners a year ago.

“In the meantime,” Krause says, “we’ve been building those integrations and the core technology around how to operate successfully in those environments with those systems running at scale. That’s the secret, because the face ID, the facial detection and recognition, we already do that extremely well. We have full confidence in being able to do that. They key is, how does the customer consume that capability. And with access control, it has to be consumed in conjunction with those other systems for it to be truly successful at scale.”

Devine also notes the importance of onboarding for bringing biometrics to enterprise access control systems.

Krause says that in contrast to AnyVision’s solution, which can import existing employee images, a competitor’s system forces every person to re-enroll.

“You’re going to ask 100,000 employees to go through a re-enrollment process in order to participate in the program. That’s very low utility,” he assesses. “If you’re the corporate security department, that’s a nightmare.”

The company is also offering a dedicated access control tablet device for certain situations like data centers, dubbed the AnyVision Touchless Access Control Point, but otherwise the solutions brings biometric liveness on any IP video sensor. Krause emphasizes the importance of robust protection from presentation attacks for enterprise access control.

Enterprises adopting facial recognition for access control can ultimately put it to work in different applications, and Krause says customers he has spoken to are interested in a number of use cases.

“Core security use of face recognition is getting a lot of scrutiny these days, as is no secret. But access control is the complete other side of the coin,” he explains. “It’s the way that organizations are now using advanced AI to get it into the enterprise to validate it capabilities; to prove that it’s not biased and that it’s actually effective.”

People are just coming to recognize that some of the concerns are caused by situations that reflect “algorithm problems not technology problems,” he says.

AnyVision is confidant in the practical utility of its touchless access solution for enterprises because of the way it fits into existing systems, and because of the strength of its core facial recognition algorithms. “Not all AI is created equal,” Krause observes.

Because of this, Devine says for enterprise security partners, “If you’re going to sell any one solution, this is the one to sell.”

Article Topics

access control  |  Anyvision  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  contactless biometrics  |  enterprise  |  facial recognition