Biometrics Solutions

SecurityStockWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, Juergen. It is an honor to speak again with one of the co-founders of Cognitec. Please give us an overview of your background and a brief company history.

Juergen Pampus: It is my pleasure. I have a background of more than 30 years in the IT industry, working in consulting, project management, sales and marketing. In 1995 at Siemens, I initiated the development of new face recognition technology which is now owned by Cognitec. I was one of five co-founders of Cognitec in 2002; we had all been part of the team since 1995. The timing for starting a company specializing in face recognition was luckily quite good as the market accelerated quickly after 2001.

So we experienced healthy growth and became an industry leading vendor. Today, our headquarters are based in Germany, and we have subsidiaries in the USA and Hong Kong. Our customers are found in more than a hundred countries.

SecurityStockWatch.com: One will read on www.cognitec.com that, "Cognitec Systems develops, markets and deploys the well-established and market-leading FaceVACS® face recognition technology to global customers. Specifically, since 1995, our experts have been developing face recognition technology that allows industry and governmental customers to prevent identity fraud, secure borders and support physical access control. Around the globe, other companies have developed and continue to create new solutions using our technology - a resounding testament to the technical proficiency and customer-friendliness of our products." Please give us an overview of FaceVACS® technology and the new extended version of FaceVACS-DBScan.

Juergen Pampus: All our products are based on the FaceVACS engine which provides a set of face recognition functions that can be used in various usage scenarios, e.g. verify if the face of a passenger is the same as the face on his passport photo, find the most similar faces in a photo database, track and identify faces in video streams, etc. Depending on the scenario, these functions are combined in our application packages that are optimized for certain customer segments. |

FaceVACS-DBScan for example is a software package used to find duplicates in large photo databases, and we have recently added sophisticated tools for our law enforcement customers. Typically, investigators often have to work with bad quality images of suspects. With our tools, they can enhance the images and so improve matching results dramatically for such difficult images.

But we also provide very flexible development toolkits that allow our partners to develop completely new face recognition applications.

SecurityStockWatch.com: Cognitec's track record as an industry leader is well established. Please tell us about the track record in terms of biometric recognition accuracy, response times, scalability, and product reliability.

Juergen Pampus: Recognition accuracy is the key to success in the biometrics industry. Regardless if you look at fingerprint, iris, face, or other recognition technologies, most customers first ask for accuracy in terms of identification rate, false alarm rate, and similar measures. The evaluation tests initiated by several US Government agencies and performed by NIST are the most well-known and respected benchmarks in the industry and Cognitec have always been in the group of top performers in these tests since we first participated in 2002. Our R&D team is working hard to maintain this leading position.

Product performance like speed, scalability, reliability, and usability has also always been a top priority for our company. To give you an example: our product FaceVACS-DBScan can perform a million facial comparisons per second on a single CPU core which is unequaled in the industry. If you think of a drivers' license agency with tens of millions of photos to be checked, you will understand that this performance is essential to those customers.More

Mr. Kerry Maletsky
Business Unit Director,
Crypto Products
Atmel Corporation
www.Atmel.com

Many of the commonly available fingerprint sensors expose the silicon surface of the sensor directly to the finger. This leads to lots of problems with potential damage due to ESD discharge or mechanical/abrasion issues. The Atmel FingerChip covers the silicon with a thick protective layer, which leads to much better reliability. And the better performance with difficult finger types comes about as a result of our use of a thermal technology similar to that used in common motion detectors.More

Mr. Guy Swope
Senior Biometrics Architect
Raytheon
www.raytheon.com
(NYSE: RTN)

Raytheon sees the PASS card evolving to include a fingerprint sensor that allows high speed, remote biometric authentication. We've now demonstrated it's technically feasible to biometrically verify an individual traveling in a car at 60 mph, something that many believe to be improbable using today's technology. Yet, we've done it. More