CyberLink targets IoT growth for biometric software available with MediaTek partnership

CyberLink Corp is expanding customer options for its AI and facial recognition technology. The company announced that its FaceMe AI biometric authentication engine is now supported on MediaTek chip, and will enable security and authentication functions on everything from smart appliances, smart homes, kiosks to retail point-of-sale systems.

CyberLink’s FaceMe facial recognition will be embedded on MediaTek’s i350 Edge AI platform. MediaTek positions the i350 for mainstream IoT applications that incorporate vision and voice edge processing, including biometrics. The platform includes MediaTek’s own processor for AI algorithms along with a 2.0 GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-53 CPU and an ARM Mali-G52 GPU (graphics processing unit).

MediaTek’s NeuroPilot platform enabled CyberLink to increase the computation speed of FaceMe for facial recognition and face attribute extraction by 3X over other chip designs, according to the announcement.

“Through the integration of FaceMe and i350, system integrators will now have access to the most efficient yet low-power consumption applications with identity verification, providing a new class of industry infrastructure to move the biometric technology forward,” said Dr. Jau Huang, CEO of CyberLink.

CyberLink, which is a publicly traded company on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE), has been making efforts to diversify from its roots in content creation. While the bulk of its business is still in OEM deals for its photo and video editing software, the company’s efforts to branch out into AI and video conferencing are starting to show some results. For the first half of 2020 results, these new lines of business were 7 percent of overall product revenues compared to less than half a percent for the same period a year ago.

The biometrics portion of business is still quite small, but the fast growth should be further enabled by adapting FaceMe for use on MediaTek chips. MediaTek is the world’s fourth largest fabless semiconductor company and is a large supplier for IoT devices. Amazon partnered with MediaTek for new chips in its next-gen Echo smart assistant devices.

Article Topics

AI chips  |  biometric identification  |  biometric software  |  biometrics  |  biometrics at the edge  |  CyberLink  |  facial recognition  |  IoT  |  MediaTek