Visionics Introduces FaceIt Technology for Pocket PC: Ushers in the Era of Biometric Use On Hand-held Devices.

Business and Technology Editors

CardTech/SecurTech 2000

JERSEY CITY, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 2, 2000

Capitalizing on the proliferation of hand-held devices with built-in cameras, Visionics Corporation, the leading developer of face recognition technology worldwide, introduced today FaceIt(R) for Pocket PC. The new software platform is being demonstrated this week at the industry convention CardTech SecurTech in the Miami Beach Convention Center, Booth #222.

Pocket PC is the latest version of the Microsoft CE operating system and is used in a variety of hand-held devices such as Casio's Cassiopeia, Hewlett Packard's Jornada, and Microsoft's upcoming MiPad, all of which feature built-in video cameras.

FaceIt(R) for Pocket PC delivers to the hand-held platform all the capabilities of the FaceIt(R) technology and is the enabling engine for many security and biometric applications of mass appeal. Mass market deployment of this capability will reach out to users authenticating e-commerce transactions from these hand-held portals. In this application for example, FaceIt(R) capabilities can be used to capture a facial image, extract the face, convert it into a unique digital code, called a faceprint, which is transmitted it to a server for authentication. By confirming the match, FaceIt(R) essentially ties the identity of the person to the actions being performed.

Another application, for mobile identification, uses FaceIt(R) capabilities that capture live facial images using the camera on the device and checks the corresponding faceprint in real-time against a designated database of several thousand individual faceprints stored in memory. Certain key industry sectors, such as law enforcement, are poised to benefit from this unique capability.

"Technology is adopted at the speed in which the surrounding infrastructure is created. With built-in cameras on hand held devices, this translates into mass-market adoption of this technology and a whole range of new applications that can be deployed for our FaceIt(R) technology", said Dr. Joseph J. Atick, Visionics' president and CEO.

By all projections, wireless hand-held devices will continue to proliferate and will support complex multi-functions. They are rapidly becoming our mobile phone, our PDA, our web portal and tomorrows ATMs and transaction devices. By certain estimates, it is projected that hand-held devices will become by 2002 the primary method by which people access the internet.

"The human desire for visual communication--not biometric security--is driving the adoption of cameras into hand-held devices. The end result is a ready-made infrastructure capable of supporting FaceIt(R) technology and biometric security," added Dr. Atick.

Running biometric technologies on these devices is a significant challenge since they typically use low-end processors that do not have sufficient power to support the computationally intensive biometric algorithms. However, over the last year Visionics has made significant advances in its technology that enables FaceIt(R) to run on low-end processors--these include a thousand-fold improvement in matching speed and a forty-fold reduction in the template-size of the faceprint that captures the facial identity. As a result of these and other architectural improvements, FaceIt(R) for Pocket PC was made possible and is now the first biometric algorithm truly adaptable on a mass-market scale as wide as the hand-held devices.

About Visionics Corporation

Founded in 1994 and co-headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey USA and Winchester, UK, Visionics Corporation is the leading developer of facial recognition technology worldwide. The company has pioneered the field of facial recognition with its award winning software engine, FaceIt(R), which allows computers to rapidly and accurately recognize faces. FaceIt(R) is an Enabling Technology with Mass Appeal(TM) that has been validated in a large number of real-world products and solutions built by Visionics OEM partners and software developers, such as Smart CCTV(TM) systems, large-scale identification systems for combating ID fraud, mass-market authentication systems for information security, banking and e-commerce. More information on Visionics can be accessed via the Company web site at http://www.visionics.com or by calling Frances Zelazny, Director of Corporate Communications at [phone].