Thales has built an undisputed leadership in many markets over the past 30 years and continues this track record in the biometric technology domain. The company regularly benchmarks the accuracy of its algorithms and develops new security mechanisms to fight fraud and to continuously improve efficiency of its face recognition technologies. However Thales reminds that the global acceptation of biometrics is closely linked to the responsible and transparent use of it. This is an essential parameter for people adoption expressed in a recent position paper.
With the global digital transformation of the world, facial recognition technology and biometrics at large, have rapidly shown their potential in bringing both the security and the convenience expected for today’s applications. While we are still at the early stage of a global adoption, the technology is ideal for the Covid-era by providing a touch-free experience. In particular, facial authentication helps us easily and safely cross borders, enrol to digital services or be granted physical access to a building without the need for keys or badges.
Thales took a lead in training its algorithms1 to adapt to the new context of mask wearing. Thanks to its deep neural network algorithms the technology is more than 99.3 % accurate when no mask is present, and around 97% for mask wearers2. On top, complex liveness detection mechanisms have been deployed to flag ID fraud and spoofing attempts, recognizing unalive versions of a face (pictures, videos, masks etc). In addition to these technical advances, Thales solutions are also designed to comply with established data protection and privacy regulations (such as GDPR) and the group openly values the need for ‘ethical biometrics’ in a recent position paper.
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“Our engagement to technologies goes far beyond the quality and the accuracy of our solutions. Today the main stake is not only to launch new solutions but to make sure they are designed to be ethically used, in line with Thales purpose and with people expectations” said Youzec Kurp VP Identity & Biometrics Solutions at Thales. “Biometrics being a highly-sensitive technology it became critical to call for more transparency and ethics in its usage; so we can build the trust we need to welcome such innovations in our daily lives.”
1uses these algorithms for its Face Recognition Platform (FRP), Cogent Automatic Biometric Identification System (CABIS), Mobile Biometric Identification (MBI), Cogent Mugshot System (CMS), and Software Development Kits (SDK).
2 as long as the reference photo is of good quality, (such as in a passport or ID document) and that the mask does not hide the eyes
