2020.08.06

PAPAGO! readies Face8 biometrics for Southeast Asia smart city projects

PAPAGO!, a Taiwan-based developer of the biometric Facial Recognition technology known as Face8, is looking to expand its market presence in Southeast Asia to serve smart city projects, Digitimes reports.

Efforts to develop Face8 began in 2016 and in 2019, the solution built with unique modules and biometric algorithms won the Taiwan Excellence Award.

Face8 has been powering a wide range of smart solutions to support a variety of biometric application requirements, according to officials of PAPAGO!. These solutions, they say, are being used by banking institutions, fitness clubs, construction companies, small and medium-sized enterprises and government agencies for access control, VIP customer service and a litany of other applications.

The company also submitted its algorithms to the 1:1 and 1:N testing tracks for the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Facial Recognition Vendor Test (NIST FRVT).

PAPAGO! Chairman Liang-Yi Chien said with the introduction of Face8, PAPAGO! has gone a long way in enhancing its capability for system integration so as to ensure better end-product performance. Chien explained that the face recognition solution is able to bring a large number of biometric applications to market and create lucrative business opportunities based on two major advantages.

According to Chien, the first advantage is that Face8 is built on top of a strong AI technology foundation, and the second is its one-stop system integration service, which allows Facial Recognition to be completed in 0.2 seconds. He says the company is aiming to extend its reach into the Southeast Asian market thanks to support from Taiwan’s Smart City Development Office, which is part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Industrial Development Bureau (IDB).

Through IDB’s support, Face8 partnered with a Malaysian distributor and systems integrator to build a Facial Recognition system for a learning center, which could be a stepping stone for PAPAGO! efforts to establish itself in countries of the region such as Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand. PAPAGO! has previously carved a niche for itself and branded its image in Southeast Asia with its automotive GPS navigation system.