Federal efforts to improve biometric identification and authentication increasingly center on facial recognition. Facial recognition has already improved mission delivery in dynamic situations such as: Port-of-Entry Screening Crowd Surveillance Cybersecurity Authentication Counter Terrorism In each case, accurate and fast identification is critical to the success of the mission. In this exclusive executive briefing from @FedNewsRadio, government and industry facial recognition experts explore trends in facial recognition. Read why it’s time to take a new look at facial recognition. Download your copy of Time to Take a New Look at Facial Recognition from NEC to learn more. Learn More at: http://necam.com/ars

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Executive Briefing Series:
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3. ExecutiveBriefingSeries:FacialRecognition
PANELOFEXPERTS
Dr. Chris Boehnen, Program Manager,
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects
Activity (IARPA)
Greg Crabb, Vice President Chief
Information Security Officer, U.S. Postal
Service
Rebecca Gambler, Director, Homeland
Security and Justice, Government
Accountability Office
Will Graves, Chief Engineer PM
Biometrics, Biometric Enabling
Capability (BEC), Department of Defense
Benji Hutchinson, Senior Director,
Washington D.C. Operations, NEC
Corporation of America
Patrick Nemeth, Director, Identity
Operations Division, Office of Biometric
Identity Management (OBIM), National
Protection and Programs Directorate,
Department of Homeland Security
Arun Vemury, Program Manager,
HSARPA/BMD/Port of Entry – People
Screening, and Lead, ST Biometric
Technology Engine, Department
of Homeland Security Science and
Technology Directorate
BYTOMTEMIN
F
ederal efforts to improve biometric
identification and authentication
increasingly center on facial
recognition. In dynamic situations
such as port-of-entry screening, crowd
surveillance, cybersecurity authentication
and counter terrorism, facial recognition has
already improved mission delivery.
Facial recognition technology itself has
advanced quite a bit in recent years, making it
more efficient, more accurate and obtainable
from farther away. Fingerprints remain the
gold standard for many applications. But
obtaining a high-quality, 10-finger set is
time-consuming and fingerprint matching
live requires physical contact, unlike facial
recognition.
Where fingerprint matching is already in
place, going multi-modal by adding facial
recognition can give a higher degree of
verification, experts say.
Federal News Radio’s recent panel
of government and industry facial
recognition experts discussed the trends
in facial recognition, where technology and
applications are moving fast.
TimetoTakea
NewLookat
FacialRecognition

4. ExecutiveBriefingSeries:FacialRecognition
FacialRecognition
TechnologyImproves
At the Intelligence Advanced Research
Projects Activity – part of the intelligence
community – Dr. Chris Boehnen heads deep
research into facial technology to meet new
and higher-velocity threats. He said IARPA
has just concluded a four-year research
program called JANUS focusing on what he
called unconstrained facial recognition.
The research started from the premise that
recognition performance is mostly reliable
for controlled face images such as those
used for drivers licenses, police mug shots,
visas and passports. But for unconstrained
situations, when the facial image is created
where pose, angle, expression and lighting
are unknown or uncontrolled, recognition
has been a challenge, Boehnen said.
What he called deep learning has “enabled
recognition to operate on a challenging
corpus of data that traditionally was not
possible.” Deep learning, long
understood, has more
recently become useful
by subjecting large
data sets used
for training
recognition
algorithms
and fast
computing
hardware.
Among the benefits of this type of neural
network work, Boehnen said, is higher
recognition levels of facial images made from
angles as opposed to straight on.
The Defense Department is also working to
extend biometric capabilities. Will Graves
is chief engineer and program manager in
the Biometric Enabling Capability (BEC),
the main developer of biometric systems
for the Defense Department. Working on
an urgent request from within the armed
services, he said the BEC has developed a
facial recognition system that works at a
range of 300 meters. That’s about 10 times
as far as current requirements within civilian
government, he said.
“They want to recognize people as far away
as possible,” Graves said. “They want to run
faces against a watch list before they get close
enough to do us harm.”
At the Homeland Security Advanced Research
Projects Agency, part of the Science and
Technology Directorate, Arun Vemury
manages biometric programs for ports of
entry. He described one of his lead projects,
a biometric engine, as a methodology for
“applying biometrics holistically.” That is,
combining more than one “mode” for more
precise identification. The directorate focuses
on taking commercially available products
and adapting them to large scale operational
environments, or making them work in the
physically constrained spaces of real-life
airports or land crossing stations.
Vemury said biometric applications have
gotten fast enough in the last few years that
they can be used inline in applications where

5. ExecutiveBriefingSeries:FacialRecognition
people need to be moved quickly. In such
situations, each second of time gained per
individual can take minutes or hours off of
long lines.
Ultimately, the value proposition for
facial recognition comes down to people,
patterns and predictions, according to Benji
Hutchinson, senior director for Washington
D.C. operations at NEC Corporation of
America. The company has been a biometrics
systems contractor since the 1980s.
Hutchinson said, “The technology has
really come a long way,” helped by a steady
infusion of government funding following
9/11. Among the characteristics of facial
recognition that have progressed, Hutchinson
said, are error rates. They’ve fallen steadily,
including instances of false positives.
NEC provides facial recognition technology
for Customs and Border Protection’s
biometric exit program. “We can make
matches as fast as five seconds, sometimes
as quickly as two seconds when people are
boarding planes,” Hutchinson said. “It’s no
longer the stop-and-stare approach.”
The mathematics, libraries and algorithms
have advanced on the software side, meaning
features included in facial recognition are
larger and more robust, Hutchinson said.
Systems aren’t evaluating just a set of
anthropomorphic dots, but also patterns,
textures and distances between facial
features.
That’s all enabled better matching results in
low light, with fuzzy images, and off-angle
views. “Before,” Hutchinson said, “these
were non-starters.” Now the algorithms can
perform pose adjustment,
make images less opaque,
and enhance images before
subjecting them to the
matching engine.
Fast computers and cloud
storage, Hutchinson said,
enable algorithms to self-
improve at a much faster rate than
human matchers could. He added
the advent of facial recognition in smart
phones will introduce hundreds of millions of
people to facial recognition for security and
commercial transactions.
FacialApplicationsWiden
The U.S. Postal Service, as the originator
of the bulk use of pictures used by the
State Department on passports, has a long
history with facial imagery. Greg Crabb, vice
president and chief information security
officer, said USPS is expanding into image
verification services. It’s working with
the FBI to offer people greater access to
fingerprints and other image-based identities
in connection with criminal background
histories.
Crabb said the Postal Service is next looking
to develop a suite of identity verification
services to combat fraud, especially as the
ability of financial institutions to protect
people’s identities comes increasingly into
question. He envisions incorporating geo-
location into facial recognition systems,
thereby raising confidence levels in positive
matches. He also wants to improve the
quality of face photographs USPS supplies to

6. ExecutiveBriefingSeries:FacialRecognition
the State Department
and other federal
entities that use them,
such as CBP.
“How do we take passport
photos so they show up well in
the [recognition] algorithms? It’s about the
collection of that image in a way that is more
reliable in granularity” and other qualities,
Crabb said.
Graves from DoD said the activity has added
several new programs to its front-end image
capture equipment and authoritative image
repository. It is now deploying capture and
recognition systems in five countries to
support foreign military sales.
In its research and development, Graves said
an array of programs in biometrics generally
seek to improve contactless fingerprints,
iris recognition in motion, rapid DNA, and
voice recognition, all in addition to the
aforementioned facial recognition at a
distance.
As the co-chair of the NATO working group
for biometrics, Graves is helping develop a
system to link 20 NATO countries’ biometric
systems in a way that honors the European
Union’s strict privacy protections.
DHS’s National Protection and Programs
Directorate’s 20-year-old IDENT system
contains 220 million unique identities,
according to Patrick Nemeth, director of
the identity operations division within the
Office of Biometric Identity Management.
Biometrics, Nemeth said, fulfills three
purposes. It confirms the identities of trusted
people, alerts law enforcement if a person’s
ID invokes derogatory information, and alerts
agents when someone is using a different
persona or biographic identity than in earlier
DHS encounters.
“Face is the new thing at the ports of entry,”
Nemeth said, filling in where fingerprinting
and iris recognition leave off. “It facilitates the
entire process [of border crossing or air entry]
and moves people along more quickly without
their having to understand the technology.”
The Government Accountability Office has
looked at facial recognition from a law
enforcement standpoint at the FBI and in
its entry-exit verification application at
Homeland Security. Rebecca Gambler, GAO’s
director of homeland security and justice
issues, said several themes have emerged
when it comes to using facial recognition.
“A couple of the key themes relate to having
good requirements at the outset,” Gambler
said. “And then, ensuring that agencies are well
positioned to test [the technology] towards
those requirements as they go through the
development and deployment process.”
Gambler said agencies also need to plan for
the personnel and infrastructure needs of
biometrics.
FacialRecognitionChallenges
Privacy and people’s perceptions of facial
capture and how their likenesses are used will
be a continuing issue for federal agencies.
Boehnen said this cultural issue varies from
place to place. In areas of rampant crime, for

7. ExecutiveBriefingSeries:FacialRecognition
example, people might be more willing to
accept ubiquitous surveillance and the mass
capture of face images into matching systems.
“As a country, we have not yet come to
grips with, if you’re in public and your
face is visible, what is appropriate for the
government to do with it,” Boehnen said.
Nemeth said it’s important to distinguish
between identification and verification
applications. ID’ing raises more alarms in
the privacy community, he said, because in
verification, people have consented to have
their faces used. “Where we seem to have
problems is in the wider, one-to-many areas.”
He makes the analogy of using fingerprints
voluntarily given for one application or
another, versus use of latent prints found
at a scene. The latter may put a person on a
suspect list or subject them to detention.
Or, people may consent to have their
information used in one application, but not
wish to have the organization, governmental
or commercial, use it in some other context
or share it with a third party for another
purpose. Vemury said people’s perception
of technology has changed in that they can
envision such scenarios.
Hutchinson said societal attitudes towards
facial recognition are changing thanks in
part to the rise of social media and people’s
willingness to put their faces out there. And
in any event, he added, privacy statutes and
impact assessments are readily available to
would-be users of facial recognition.
On the technology front, a couple of
new capabilities are coming to the facial
recognition field. These include recognition
from video images, including video from
social media and dark web sources.
Adjusting for atmospheric distortion is
another area where improvement is needed.
DoD’s Graves explained that when taking
pictures with a 1,000-mm lens at an airfield,
heat waves can distort faces, and algorithms
need to adjust for that phenomenon. Lens
distortion itself is easily corrected for,
Boehnen said, presuming the user is familiar
with the lens that captured the face.
Graves said DoD is also looking to facial
recognition under shortwave and longwave
infrared lighting. That is, recognition and
matching in darkness. The armed services
also want to add biometric algorithms to
existing sensors, such as the sights on a tank.
Another challenge, according to panelists,
is improving 2-D and 3-D recognition so flat
images can’t “fool” a recognition system, and
improving matching speeds for large scale
situations like street crowds or stadiums.
DHS’s Nemeth said it’s also important
to develop confidence in image veracity
from non-governmental systems, such as
commercial surveillance, as is the ability to
read faces through vehicle windshields.
Ultimately, panelists agreed, there is
no perfect biometric. But facial and iris
recognition are improving. In the future the
fusion of multiple biometrics will improve
the efficiency of and expand the biometrics of
them all.
Tom Temin is a Washington freelance writer with
40 years in business-to-business journalism.
E-mail him at tom@tomtemin.com.