Intel is going to power a face recognition engine that can identify people even when they are moving in a crowd. This is to detect and prevent possible mishaps at critical facilities and public places. NEC is backed by Intel’s Arria 10 field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) operating on Intel Xeon processor-based servers. 

 

This would aid in increasing the performance of its NEC NeoFace facial recognition engine to a level where any individual could be identified from a high-resolution image with dozens of faces.

 

The accuracy of the technology has been evaluated by the NIST test in two real-life test scenarios. In the test for entry-exit management at an airport passenger gate, it determined whether and how well the engine could identify people as they walked through an area one at a time without stopping or looking at the camera. NEC’s technology won first place with a matching accuracy of 99.2%. 

 

 

In the second test, the technology was asked to detect suspicious individuals at an indoor stadium. It was conducted with individuals situated far from the camera with their face direction changing constantly. Here, NEC’s technology won first place with an error rate of half that of the second place error rate.

 

To create the NeoFace Accelerator, NEC’s NeoFace facial recognition engine software IP is integrated into an Intel Arria 10 FPGA, keeping the same accuracy level while achieving higher performance in facial recognition than the previous solution.

 

Intel teams also worked with NEC to enhance the performance of NeoFace data center server technology. NEC NeoFace Accelerator includes not only the Intel Arria 10 FPGA, but also an Intel® MAX® 10 low-cost FPGA and Intel® Enpirion® power devices.

 

 

Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California that was founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. It is the world’s largest and highest valued semiconductor chip makers based on revenue and is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors: the processors found in most personal computers (PCs). 

 

Intel supplies processors for computer systems and manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing.