How NEC can bring the future of biometrics to agencies today

This content is sponsored by NEC Corporation of America

Imagine going to the airport. Imagine interacting with the ticket agent. Imagine waiting in line at security checkpoints. Imagine handing your ticket to the agent as you board. Imagine showing your driver’s license or passport multiple times to multiple agents as you make your way through the security-laden labyrinth that is the post-9/11 airport. Now imagine going to the airport without having to do any of that. That’s what NEC Corporation of America imagines.

NEC provides enterprise-level biometrics platforms for more than 1 million people, including video analytics with facial recognition, line or queue management, object detection, and the ability to identify and track people across regions, dates and times. They also deal with mobile technology, like body cams and biometric collection enrollment equipment.

But now they’re working on something new: a unified biometric key.

“This is our vision for replacing paper and friction in travel and security scenarios,” said Benji Hutchinson, NEC Vice President for Federal Operations. “This vision will allow people to adopt a new paradigm where barriers such as gates, man traps and security checkpoints are a thing of the past. The goal is to improve efficiency and the flow of people through spaces while maintaining and raising the level of security and safety.”

This unified biometric key would be a single method that replaces all other forms of identification, and would allow NEC to introduce new security tech that wouldn’t be constrained by the current patterns, but instead would be peppered throughout airports, both land and sea ports-of-entry, federal buildings, military bases and transportation hubs. The idea is to totally replace all interactions by using biometrics on the move.

And not the kind we have most commonly now, like fingerprint scanners. Those require contact, and people can tend to balk at touching something hundreds of other people have had their hands on each day. This would be contactless, paperless and frictionless.

That’s something the Department of Homeland Security has interest in. Arun Vemury, director of the Biometrics Technology Engine at the Homeland Security Department. One of his lead projects is a biometric engine, a methodology for “applying biometrics holistically,” or combining more than one “mode” for more precise identification.

One big component of this unified biometric key would be facial recognition, a technology NEC has been making advances in recently, managing to improve the accuracy and performance of facial recognition and video surveillance. It’s another way NEC is driving innovation and change.

“We can make matches as fast as five seconds, sometimes as quickly as two seconds when people are boarding planes,” Hutchinson said. “It’s no longer the stop-and-stare approach.”

This is the system used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection as part of their biometric exit program.

“Face is the new thing at the ports of entry,” said Patrick Nemeth, director of the identity operations division within the Office of Biometric Identity Management. “It facilitates the entire process [of border crossing or air entry] and moves people along more quickly without their having to understand the technology.”

Faster computers and algorithms have allowed facial recognition to proceed beyond just evaluating anthropomorphic dots and onto recognizing patterns, textures and the distance between facial features. That means the systems can make better matches despite factors that would ordinarily interfere, like low light, fuzzy images or bad angles.

This comes as certain government agencies, including the Defense Department, DHS, FBI, and even the Postal Service have expressed interest in newer biometric technologies. But entrenched bureaucracy can make any form of innovation difficult, especially in agencies that are still trying to figure out how to implement the newest forms of technologies with a purchasing system that was never designed to keep up with the speed of innovation.

“Modernization is difficult for large agencies,” Hutchinson said. “These organizations have existing investments in technology, processes and procedures based on the way business is conducted today, and the way business was conducted in the past. But slowly, step by step, things are changing.”

One advance that the DoD is looking for is long-range facial recognition. They want it to work at a range of 300 meters, about 10 times as far as current requirements within civilian government, where it’s mostly used within the confines of buildings like airports and federal installations.

“They want to recognize people as far away as possible,” said Will Graves, deputy product manager and chief engineer for biometrics enabling capability in DoD. “They want to run faces against a watch list before they get close enough to do us harm.”

But that’s not easy; atmospherics, heat waves, and any number of other potential distorting factors can come into play. Plus, it can require special telephoto lenses, which aren’t easy to use with video.

That’s why Hutchinson says that “NEC is tackling some of the toughest challenges facing the national defense and homeland security landscape.”

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