New world. French company wins global facial recognition competition

Specializing in biometrics and in particular facial recognition, the French company Idemia has just won the international Face Recognition Vendor Test competition, organized by the United States. It was ahead of 270 European, Chinese and American competitors such as Microsoft.

franceinfo: How is your technology the most efficient?

Vincent Bouatou, Director of Strategic Innovation at Idemia : The contest was to show a photo of a face to our algorithm so that it could find it in the middle of a base of over a million others. Our technology, which draws on decades of experience, has proven to be the best, with a ridiculously low error rate. We are very proud of this result obtained by our research and development teams.

What can this facial recognition technology be used for?

There are many use cases. For example, facial recognition can be used to make strong identification when opening a bank account, by comparing the photo of the person’s face with the photo of their ID.

Border control can also be automated, as is the case in France in particular at certain airports. This allows you to go through an automatic airlock, which will compare the passport photo and the person’s face, without the need for manual checks. In Paris and Lyon today, this makes it possible to speed up all the control stages in order to board the plane very quickly. We have equipped Singapore International Airport so that a person can board within 10 minutes of arriving at the airport.

Facial recognition is scary. How to reassure?

There is a real need for transparency on the uses of this technology. Why is it deployed? For what purposes? How? You have to be able to guarantee that biometric data, that is, your face information, is not stored in a database that can be used. In our case, we just make a comparison, then we forget everything. There is no dissemination.

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) really pushes for this, since we have to do a privacy impact assessment for each solution deployed. In addition, there is also today, for most biometric identification systems, a possibility for the user to simply refuse facial recognition and request that the process be done manually.