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Semiconductor manufacturing company Intel in partnership with Japanese electronics giant NEC is set to roll out facial recognition system at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The tech giant has divulged details of its work with NEC that will see the latter's NeoFace technology deployed across the Japanese capital in time for next year's summer sporting extravaganza.

The companies will be collaborating on a ‘large-scale face recognition system’ that expedite the time it takes for athletes, coaches, volunteers, and media to be processed through security checkpoints. Considering the companies statements, the facial recognition technology system is designed to smoothly secure verification for more than 300,000 people at the games who are accredited.

Accredited personnel at the Olympics will still have to wear traditional IDs. If somebody loses their physical ID or tries to get access with one that is stolen, the facial recognition system will block them. Furthermore, the system will essentially validate the identity of the person seeking access against their physical IDs.

"This is the first time that facial recognition technology is going to be used for this purpose at the Olympic Games," General Manager of Intel’s Olympics Program, Rick Echevarria said. NEC will be deploying hundreds of systems powered by Intel Core i5 processors at gates throughout the games, including the Athletes Village in Tokyo, he added.

NEC’s NeoFace Overview

NEC’s system is developed on an Artificial Intelligence engine ‘NeoFace’, which is part of their Bio-IDiom line of biometric authentication technology. The face recognition system’s strength lies in its tolerance of poor quality. With NeoFace's proven ability to match low-resolution facial images, including images with low resolutions down to 24 pixels between the eyes, there is a large separation between NEC's NeoFace technology and all other face recognition systems matching accuracy in the market.

The NeoFace suite has multiple facial recognition products for video surveillance, forensic application, among others. The NeoFace suite has also a facial recognition system, named Smart ID, used for field operations that gather and recognizes biometrics, face, voice, demographics, and other data.

Intel is also involved in other Olympic-related moves, too. The company is helped to develop a technology called 3DAT (3D Athlete Tracking) that broadcasters can utilize to boost instant-replay videos with data about player movements. An AI system processes video data abruptly to create the overlay graphics.

The chipmaker is also assisting to run a global esports gaming competition in parallel with the Olympics in Tokyo. In this global esports gaming competition, players from an initial group of 20 countries will compete in the videogame event. It will also include participation from gaming companies Capcom and Epic Games.