May 14, 2020 - TOKYO, JAPAN: NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced the development of a multimodal biometric authentication terminal incorporating face and iris recognition technologies that have been recognized as the world's No.1 (1) in benchmark tests for identification technologies conducted by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and are core technologies of NEC's multimodal biometric authentication brand, "Bio-IDiom"(2).

This reinforces NEC's ability to provide high levels of authentication accuracy and convenience for users throughout a wide range of environments.

In recent years, biometric authentication, which analyzes the physical or behavioral characteristics of individuals, such as facial and iris features, has been rapidly expanding throughout the world, including biometric authentication with smartphones and entryways to a wide range of facilities.

NEC has implemented more than 1,000 biometric authentication systems in approximately 70 countries and regions around the world. The high levels of accuracy, convenience and security of these systems enable them to be reliably deployed as an important part of social infrastructure supporting the safety and security of daily life, ranging from corporate applications to entertainment and personal use.

NEC's multimodal biometric authentication, which combines multiple biometric identification technologies, such as face and iris recognition, is easy for individuals to use and achieves high levels of authentication accuracy (*3).

NEC's newly developed multimodal biometric authentication terminal integrates face recognition technology with iris recognition technology that have each been recognized as the world's most accurate.

This enables stable, high-precision and high-speed authentication in large-scale systems that need to respond to numerous physical characteristics and in usage environments that require strict identity verification.

Multimodal biometric terminals are expected to be widely used for a variety of applications, including systems targeting large numbers of users, access to and exit from offices that require high levels of security, access to food plants that require hygienic clothing and masks, clean rooms in factories, medical facilities, as well as identification of customers at ATMs and prompt payment at stores.