Israeli facial recognition firm ranked most accurate in Western world

"We are creating the missing link in making our cities truly smart, our offices responsive, and our homes more livable,” said the company's CEO, Avi Golan.

Facial recognition is currently being used to cross borders and even enter hospitals. To ensure AI systems aren't biased, AnyVision researcher Dr. Eduard Vazquez told the Post, you must have excellent data. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Facial recognition is currently being used to cross borders and even enter hospitals. To ensure AI systems aren't biased, AnyVision researcher Dr. Eduard Vazquez told the Post, you must have excellent data.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Israeli-based vision artificial intelligence platform company, AnyVision, announced that it has scored top rankings across all five categories in the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT), ranking the company 7th in the world, and first among Western countries.
The 6 algorithms that ranked in the top places are those of companies from China and Russia whose systems are not common among Western countries, which accounts for Israel's top score.
The tests, conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), measured the performance of automated face recognition technologies applied to a wide range of civil, law enforcement and homeland security applications, including verification of visa images, de-duplication of passports, recognition across photojournalism images, and identification of child exploitation victims. 
The NIST tests evaluated 177 individual algorithms, and reported facial recognition technology performance in one-to-one scenarios, comparing one face image against a different input image, measuring for accuracy, speed, storage and memory consumption, and resilience. 
“AnyVision's technology is optimized for interpreting real-world video sequences on low power embedded devices, which is actually much harder to solve than what NIST focuses on, which is static images and photos, processed using Intel hardware,” said AnyVision CTO Dieter Joecker. 
“The fact that we do not design our algorithms for NIST and still achieved very balanced, high rankings across all categories - including two that were not included in the initial ranking — is truly impressive. It’s a testament to how advanced our technology really is," Joecker added.
The report also measured accuracy with face masks, as well as ranging across characteristics such as age, region, country, race and gender.
“These results reflect the significant investments AnyVision has made to ensure that the algorithms that power its AI engine are superior in the market,” said AnyVision CEO Avi Golan. 
“We have taken the crucial first steps towards bridging the digital-to-physical divide, with a platform for understanding the way people experience and interact with the physical world," added Golan. "In other words, we are creating the missing link in making our cities truly smart, our offices responsive, and our homes more livable.”