After earning the top ranking in a U.S. government evaluation of software algorithms for face recognition, California-based Paravision is letting it be known that the small company is a force to reckon with and can meet the needs of private and public sector customers worldwide looking for top rated technology that isn’t tainted by association with the Chinese government.
“People see us as a lightweight, nimble company that is able to produce globally ranked technology quickly and effectively in an era where we’re starting to see the likes of China overtake us in some of these specific artificial intelligence and computer vision areas,” Benji Hutchinson, president and chief operating officer of Paravision, told HSR recently.
In the latest face recognition vendor test managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where algorithms are evaluated in matching a face image against a large database of face images, Paravision ranked first, followed by China’s SenseTime, Japan’s NEC Corp., Netherlands-based VisionLabs, and France-based IDEMIA.
SenseTime was ranked first previously. NEC’s face recognition matching algorithm is used in two key Department of Homeland Security databases, the IDENT biometric system and Customs and Border Protection’s Traveler Verification Service (TVS), which is used for the agency’s biometric entry and exit program.
The NEC algorithm used in the TVS has an error rate 50 times higher than Paravision’s, Joey Pritikin, Paravision’s chief product officer, said in the same interview.
For the biometric entry and exit program, CBP maintains that the face recognition performance is greater than 98 percent accuracy.
Now, the face matching technology is advancing to 99.9-plus percent, Hutchinson said, adding this is “the same territory” of success with matching algorithms using 10 fingerprints, which is “very mature” technology.
“There is sort of an overarching story in the media that China is winning the AI war against the U.S. and face recognition tends to be viewed as a tip of the spear when it relates to AI and computer vision because of the way its deployed, because of the NIST rankings, [which is] a very prestigious thing,” Pritikin said. “And so, a story that we’re trying to get out there is, “Hey, you think the U.S. is losing the AI war to China? Here’s this little company that you may not have heard of and they just took out the biggest AI company from China in the most prestigious ranking in the world.’”
SenseTime is one of China’s four “AI dragons,” artificial intelligence-based start-up companies valued at $1 billion or more. The company is also on the U.S. Entity List, which means the U.S. government has evidence SenseTime is involved or becoming involved in activities that are a at odds with U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.
SenseTime, as one of the four ‘AI dragons’ is working very closely with the Chinese government in ways we thing are problematic and unethical,” Pritikin said.
The U.S. intelligence community maintains that the Chinese government has backdoors that give it access to data collected by the country’s technology companies.
Small and Agile
Paravision, which is headquartered in San Francisco, has less than 50 employees. The seven-year-old company pivoted about five years ago from selling a photo-sharing application to consumers to developing software for face recognition and activity recognition such as object detection and tracking, and people counting.
Hutchinson described Paravision as “not exclusively a biometrics or identity company,” adding that, “We are more a computer vision and AI software company and that is one of the biggest reasons you see us performing so well in these tests.”
The NIST tests showed that Paravision’s technology is 99.98 percent accurate in verifying passengers are eligible to board an aircraft but with a focus on computer vision, the company can offer its customers even more utility such as if people are carrying bags or if someone has left a bag, Pritikin said. As a small company, Paravision can be more cost-competitive, but it’s capabilities in AI and computer vision offer customers a different value proposition that other competitors, he said.
Paravision also works with its customers to understand their needs and sales models to bring the “right kind of value to their end customers,” Pritikin said.
Paravision’s current customers are largely in the commercial sector, most of which are outside of the U.S. but the company has some U.S. government customers, including one in the intelligence community and the Air Force. Paravision also recently won a contract with a law enforcement agency in one of the largest countries in Europe, he said.
Paravision has been in and around the Top 10 of the NIST rankings before but “we don’t have a lot of notoriety in the beltway yet, I would say, but we’re working on that, because we do have an intel customer, the Air force is a customer, and we think that other parts of DoD will soon adopt our technology,” Hutchinson said.
HID Global, a global security company serving public and private sectors, is one of Paravision’s customers for face recognition solutions. Hutchinson said that Paravision is also targeting the use of its products in physical, logical access, identity verification, and know your customer. The aviation and automobile sectors are also target markets, he said.
Hutchinson and Pritikin also emphasized the ethical approach that Paravision takes to developing its software.
“Our data is consent driven and paid for,” Pritikin said. The company doesn’t “scrape the internet” for face images and doesn’t have a “pipeline” to the government the way companies on some countries might to help collect images for use in developing its algorithms, he said.
Paravision also doesn’t sell to any country that’s on the DoD’s list of special concern, he said.