NEC and Keyless identify high marks in NIST face biometrics benchmark

Keyless is celebrating a new high result in a key category of the Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE) held by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The company’s result, along with repeated high results from NEC, are contained in NIST’s March 18 update of the FRTE 1:N.

Keyless finished 11th in the category for good quality mugshots (1.6 million of them) compared to low quality probe images from webcams in the investigation setting, with 99.93 percent of mated searches returning the correct individual as the rank one match.

The result is higher than any commercially implementations, according to Keyless.

The investigation scenario involves no false positive identification rate threshold, and all searches return a candidate.

Keyless joined the NIST evaluation on February 5.

“These results show we can deliver high accuracy even when image quality is poor or the system needs to be strict about false matches,” says Paolo Gasti, co-founder and CTO of Keyless. “We’re especially proud of our strong performance in the webcam scenarios, which better reflect the real world.”

NEC refreshes high scores

NEC scored the best results worldwide in the Mugshot N=12 million, with an error rate of 0.07 percent, as well as in the Border N=16 million ΔT ≥ 10 YRS and Mugshot ΔT ≥ 12 YRS categories. The company’s algorithm submitted in January came second in the other five categories on the leaderboard.

The company notes in its announcement that it has regularly placed at the top of the NIST FRTE (and previously FRVT) leaderboard, and its “unrivaled” accuracy for the aging test of ten years, which is the maximum length of validity for passports.

NEC’s facial recognition will be used for admission control at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan.

Article Topics

accuracy  |  biometric testing  |  biometrics  |  Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE)  |  facial recognition  |  Keyless  |  NEC  |  NIST