Visionics Corp, the Jersey City, New Jersey-based facial recognition technology provider, is developing a toolkit to enable facial images to be put on a barcode. Joseph Atick, president and CEO, envisages airlines using the technology, which will cost only one cent per user: the ultimate is when every boarding pass, every piece of luggage checked in, will have a facial biometric.
FaceIt uses feature recognition technology developed at the Rockefeller University in New York, which concentrates on the area from the corners of the eyes to the tip of the nose rather than the alterable sectors, such as hair and mouth. It therefore takes up less memory, enabling databases to search more records in the same time. FaceIt can search 45 million images per minute, whereas the technology from Boston-based Miros, searching images that take up ten times the memory space, will only manage between 60,000 and 100,000.
Atick says that demand is being driven, not by traditional access control, but by law enforcement authorities and surveillance. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and Interpol are all already Visionics customers, and it sasy it is already talking to GTE’s subsidiary CyberTrust about future partnerships to combine public key infrastructure (PKI) with biometrics.
Privately-held Visionics registered sales $5m last year, and is growing at around 50% per annum, Atick said. He said it is looking to expand operations overseas and will open offices in France and Japan in the next 12 months.
