SAFR at IFSEC 2022: Europe’s first look at new biometric scanners

SAFR from RealNetworks presented its new SAFR SCAN access control scanners for the first time in Europe at the IFSEC 2022 conference in London last week.

The devices can be deployed both indoors and outdoors and can authenticate up to 30 individuals per minute.

“[SAFR SCAN devices] are designed to be very user-friendly, cost-effective and easily deployable for access control applications,” Charlie Bennett, SAFR Vice President for EMEA tells Biometric Update.

“[The scanners] have a camera and the whole SAFR facial recognition platform built into it,” Bennett adds.

Because they rely on SAFR’s lightweight algorithms, the scanners also have lower deployment costs, since no additional servers are needed.

“You can store more than 20,000 people in the device’s database locally at the edge.”

In terms of additional features, Bennet explains the new scanners have a dynamic way of changing exposure levels.

This means that when faces are detected, even if there is a lot of shadow on the face because of a bright background, the device will quickly adjust the exposure of the camera to be able to capture a good image of the face.

“From an access control perspective, if it’s being used with the turnstile [you] don’t have to stop and look at it but you can walk straight through without having to break a step,” Bennet says.

“And the other thing that the algorithms can verify is having one of the lowest racial bias rates as well, which is a real-life problem where systems might not be as accurate with different demographics, but also from an ethical point of view that’s something that we’re really focused on.”

Additionally, all enrolled and scanned biometric data is reportedly encrypted and does not contain any visual imagery of individuals’ faces.

The SAFR Scan devices have recently won the company the 2022 Platinum Govies Award for Access Control in the category of Biometrics.

The company’s face biometrics algorithms have also been added to the Moro Hub’s Integrated Physical Security Platform (IPSP) for deployment in Dubai.

Article Topics

access control  |  authentication  |  biometrics  |  computer vision  |  facial recognition  |  IFSEC  |  RealNetworks  |  SAFR