<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/technology/14FACE.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=top>

The New York Times

March 14, 2003 

Face-Recognition Technology Improves 
By BARNABY J. FEDER 


Facial recognition technology has improved substantially since 2000, according to 
results released yesterday of a benchmark test by four federal government agencies 
involving systems from 10 companies. 

The data, which is the latest in a series of biannual tests overseen by the National 
Institute of Standards and Technology, is expected to encourage government security 
officers to deploy facial recognition systems in combination with fingerprinting and 
other biometric systems for applications like verifying that people are who they claim 
to be and identifying unknown people by comparing them with a database of images. 

But the report also highlighted continuing shortcomings, like the poor performance of 
recognition systems in outdoors settings in which even the best systems made correct 
matches to the database of images just 50 percent of the time. And it cited outcomes 
that it said needed more research, like the tendency of the systems to identify men 
better than women and older subjects better than young ones. 

The report was strictly a technical evaluation and did not discuss any of the privacy 
or civil rights concerns that have stirred opposition to the technology. 

Because the results of the different companies are public, the testing is also 
expected to become a marketing tool for those who did best, including Identix, 
Cognitec Systems and Eyematic Interfaces. It is expected to be especially helpful to 
Cognitec, a tiny German company that is not widely known in the United States, and 
Eyematic, a San Francisco-based company best known for capturing data from traits like 
facial structures, expressions and gait to create animated entertainment. 

``Face recognition had been just a subdiscipline for us,'' said Hartmut Neven, chief 
technical officer and a founder of Eyematic. He said that domestic security needs had 
created a marketing opportunity that Eyematic was gearing up to chase. 

The results were not as positive for Viisage Technology, which had been among the 
leaders in 2000. Viisage said that the results, that it identified just 64 percent of 
the test subjects from a database of 37,437 individuals, were at odds with the strong 
performance it had been having with big customers, like the State of Illinois. While 
the government test is the largest for such technology, the number of images in the 
database was far below the 13 million that Viisage deals with for the Illinois 
Department of Motor Vehicles, where the company says it has picked thousand of 
individuals seeking multiple licenses under different names. 

``We suspect there must have been human or software errors in how our system was 
interfaced with the test,'' said James Ebzery, senior vice president for sales and 
marketing for Viisage. While Viisage scrambles to explain its views to customers and 
chase down any potential problems in the test, it is taking comfort in the tendency of 
big companies and government agencies to perform their own testing on their own data 
before selecting Viisage or one of its rivals. 

The government's benchmarking was performed last summer but the results were not fully 
tabulated and analyzed until recently. The report singled out a finding that in 
``reasonable controlled indoor lighting,'' the best facial recognition systems can 
correctly verify that a person in a photograph or video image is the same person whose 
picture is stored in a database 90 percent of the time. In addition, only one subject 
in 100 is falsely linked to an image in the data base in the top systems. 

The report also noted that performance has been enhanced by improving technology to 
rotate images taken at an angle so that the facial recognition software can be applied 
to a representation of a frontal view. 

The data examined whether facial recognition systems could help with the so-called 
watch list challenge, which involves determining if the person photographed is on a 
list of individuals who are wanted for some reason and then identifying who they are. 
Cognitec, the leading performer on that test, gained a 77 percent rating but its 
success rate fell to 56 percent when the watch list grew to 3,000. 

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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