French Company Named No.1 for Facial Recognition

IDEMIA today announced that its facial recognition algorithm, “1:N” came top among 75 tested systems and 281 entrants in NIST’s latest FRVT. FRVT measures how well facial recognition systems work for civil, law enforcement and security applications covering accuracy, speed, storage, and memory criteria. FRVT test results are acknowledged to be the gold standard of the global security industry.

NIST’s test results establish that IDEMIA has the best identification system on the market. Taking border control systems as an example, IDEMIA achieved the best accuracy score of 99.65% correct matches out of 1.6 million face images.

One of the important aspects of AI-based automated facial recognition is to teach its various algorithms not only to be accurate but fast and optimized for fairness. IDEMIA’s facial recognition solutions work with or without masks and with the best trade-off between speed and accuracy, demographic parity and are able to process face profile images. FRVT evaluated IDEMIA’s core algorithms underlying all its systems using facial recognition which addresses access control, public security and border control needs.

IDEMIA’s Chief Technology Officer Jean-Christophe Fondeur said: “IDEMIA has always advocated for the responsible and ethical use and development of biometric technologies. The test results confirm IDEMIA’s long-standing expertise in facial recognition AI-based research and how advanced our technology is. We strive to demonstrate our leadership by regularly taking part in NIST tests. It’s very important to have government agencies check how our algorithms measure up against other algorithms based on large data volumes. We’re thrilled that our results consistently come out at the very top”.

Only yesterday, the company announced that it is collaborating with Microsoft to support its new Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) verifiable credentials identity solution, now in public preview. Azure AD verifiable credentials enable organizations to confirm information about individuals, such as their education, professional or citizenship certifications, without collecting or storing their personal data.

Verifiable credentials aim to replace hard-copy identity credentials such as physical badges, loyalty cards, and government-issued paper documents. The companies believe this digital representation of identity or credential allows individuals to take full ownership over that personal information, which is stored on a digital wallet and accessed with a mobile device.

Within verifiable credentials, IDEMIA’s identity verification tools match the data against the system of records to provide authoritative proof of identity for an individual. Because the digital information is verified by IDEMIA, the individual is protected by layers of security, and verification will take minutes instead of days or weeks. IDEMIA is launching the service in the U.S. with plans to expand to additional markets.

“Mobile ID solutions such as Verifiable Credentials are the single most important security innovation since locking your front door”, said Matt Thompson, senior vice president, Civil Identity, at IDEMIA North America. “This technology that Microsoft is now supporting in Azure Active Directory increases access to personal information while improving the security of their identity against theft, making it easier and faster for governments and organizations to verify identities and credentials”.

IDEMIA is a global leader in Augmented Identity, which the company say provide a trusted environment enabling citizens and consumers to perform their daily critical activities (such as pay, connect and travel), in the physical as well as digital space. The company provide Augmented Identity for international clients from the Financial, Telecom, Identity, Public Security and IoT sectors with close to 15,000 employees around the world, servicing clients in 180 countries.

You can find more information about IDEMIA on its website.

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