International. NEC's iris recognition technology achieved the highest score in iris Exchange's most recent match accuracy assessment (IREX IX, *1), one of the tests of automatic iris recognition algorithms conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Iris recognition technology is a biometric identifier that uses patterns of the iris, the doughnut-like tissue that surrounds the pupil. In recent years, this technology has been adopted by systems that require large-scale adaptation, mainly for organizations and enterprises, as it is possible to quickly provide highly accurate authentication with devices that do not require physical contact.
From the standpoint of protecting privacy and improving security, government agencies in particular increasingly need reliable personal authentication for purposes including citizen identification, immigration enforcement, and criminal investigations.
NEC is a global leader in biometric identification technologies, including iris, face, fingerprint, palm printing, veins, voice and ear acoustics, and has supplied more than 700 systems in more than 70 countries. Similarly, NEC's facial recognition technology has ranked first in NIST benchmarking four consecutive times (*2), in addition to the company's fingerprint recognition technology, which also ranks first. Each of these technologies belongs to NEC's biometric authentication brand, "Bio-IDiom" (*3).
NEC received the best accuracy rating in the IREX IX assessment among the 13 participating groups, with 99.33% accuracy for near-infrared iris imaging. NEC's assessment was achieved with its original technologies in high-precision feature extraction, pairing and advanced noise reduction.
