Ayonix CEO discusses RRP S4E partnership, biometric portfolio and future plans

Ayonix has renewed its partnership with India’s RRP S4E, which the firm’s Founder and CEO Sadi Vural discussed in an exclusive interview with Biometric Update, along with the capabilities of its face biometric technology and future plans.

The Japan-based company focuses on facial recognition solutions, and was established in 2007, and for three years focused on local business partnerships.

After that, Ayonix closed a number of partnerships with various governments and law enforcement departments to enable the institutions to identify potential suspects by utilizing facial recognition technologies.

Today, the company counts more than 70 distributors and several resellers and software partners all over the world.

An optimized facial recognition network

From a technical standpoint, Ayonix’s technology is integrated into standard IP cameras (AICAM) and then managed via a centralized platform.

“So, by using a standard PC, you can manage thousands of cameras and do face recognition without using any cloud or GPU or expensive server machines anymore,” Vural tells Biometric Update.

According to Ayonix’s CEO, every camera can analyze each face, identify them, extract the attributes like gender, age, expression, mask, sunglasses, and serve the results to the management server.

“The management server then makes this information visible and puts [the data] into graphs and tables [and can automate commands like] opening a door, playing a video or alert sound, triggering an external system and so on.”

The cameras running Ayonix’s technology feature full-HD resolution at 30fps speed, and thanks to the system’s centralized structure, they can follow a person across different cameras.

A strict testing process

In order to assess the performance and biometric capabilities of its solution, Ayonix reportedly tested more than 15 facial recognition engine development companies using various hardware platforms.

“To test the engines, we used a Raspberry Pi 3 and processed full-HD images. All other engines completed the face recognition identification process not faster than 2fps. The Ayonix engine performed 27fps,” Vural says.

In addition, memory consumption during tests was only 100MB in the Ayonix engine, while other engines used at least 512MB.

“In addition to this internal test, we also got to know that the Ayonix engine overperformed other engines in NIST tests,” Vural adds.

Addressing privacy concerns

Ayonix is a privacy-focused company, Vural says, and all the data the company captures is processed inside standard IP camera devices.

“We do not copy any stream or image to any server. Everything is entirely happening on a closed device and the device does not know the personal data at all.”

According to the CEO, the camera within the Ayonix system only reports the extracted biometric information.

“This information is also secured and there is a face-chain method which is very similar to blockchain encryption. So we have not met any privacy problems until now.”

Ayonix is also reportedly developing its own deep learning platform that will specifically focus on the recognition of human faces rather than general object analysis.

“This gives us more control on technology and platform,” Vural explains. “In addition, most competitors offer SDK [software development kits] and APIs instead of out-of-shelf products. Ayonix develops the [facial recognition] engine as well as the final products by including a total system and hardware platform.

The RRP S4E partnership

Ayonix has recently renewed its partnership with RRP S4E, an India-based research tech company focusing on electro-optics technologies.

“We partnered with them because they were experienced with military and law enforcement departments to which we wanted to offer our technology,” Vural says.

The companies have been collaborating for five years already, with RRP S4E marketing Ayonix facial recognition products, mainly in India.

Moving forward, Vural says he hopes the partnership will last for at least five more years.

“RRP S4E performed a lot better than any other Indian in a short period of time,” he explains. “That’s why we entered into a partnership [with them].”

Facial recognition in healthcare

Looking at the future, Vural says Ayonix will continue its efforts in supporting governments and law enforcement institutions, but will also renew its efforts in facial recognition solutions for healthcare.

“Our long-term plan is to use this technology for the healthcare industry to understand people’s health condition from their faces. We are now conducting research for this.”

Specifically, Ayonix plans to develop a mobile e-doctor application.

“Your phone will be your medical doctor or GP,” Vural says. “It will be a radiologist and an oncologist. Your mobile will be able to tell you your medical conditions instantly.”

According to the CEO, the technology would potentially help a vast number of people to recognize and tackle several types of diseases early on, including various forms of cancer.

“If Steve Jobs had this technology on his iPhone, he would be with us now.”

Article Topics

Ayonix  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  criminal ID  |  data protection  |  facial recognition  |  healthcare  |  privacy  |  research and development  |  video surveillance