Imageonix Technologies, a “technology integrator” with extensive involvement in facial recognition, joined DPAA in 2017. Mike Broggie, CEO of Imageonix, spoke with Mel Stott about the company’s plans to win a market share in DOOH advertising.
You recently announced a partnership agreement with
Tokyo-based Ayonix to offer a series of facial recognition
products in the U.S. Please tell us about this technology
and its various applications.
Our company, Imageonix, is a Virginia-based technology integrator and the lead distribution partner for Ayonix in the US and Canada.
Ayonix has been on the front lines of advancing facial recognition technology for over a decade.
Their specialty is to continuously advance the speed and accuracy of face matching at-scale – for example, matching a single face in a six-million-person data base in less than half a second. The scanning and matching algorithm is light enough to run inside common industrial security cameras – which dramatically reduces hardware costs.
Over the past two years, Ayonix has dedicated engineering resources to develop various commercial applications on the core algorithm, which was initially developed exclusively for security use. The solutions are organized around three product groups, and an SDK is also available.
Ayonix Public Security serves in multiple industrial security applications, including as a plug-in for the ubiquitous Milestone video management system in-use in security systems worldwide.
Ayonix Face Matcher is an end-to-end face enrollment and recognition engine that can operate on any off-the-shelf PC or tablet.
Ayonix DISA is a platform for DOOH that combines demographic data streaming and ad serving in a single application suite – currently completing beta testing with partners in the US and EU.
When will Ayonix DISA be available for DOOH market?
Initial commercial deployments of our DISA smart screen product suite are planned for second quarter. We have a handful of pilot projects running and are open to doing 3-4 more this year.
How can it be used by digital out-of-home advertisers?
The DISA product was developed specifically for use in DOOH environments that require massive scale and low per-unit cost for both hardware and software. Setup is simple to configure and operate. The system includes an integrated Web UI and built-in ad serving capabilities. It’s also hardware agnostic with open architecture, so we’re able to integrate with other platforms, offer white-label solutions, and quickly add features as the market demands.
When people hear “facial recognition” they often worry
about privacy issues. How do you address these concerns?
For DOOH applications, Ayonix does not create or store PII (personally identifiable information) or retrievable images in the process of generating real-time demographic data.
Many people don’t realize that, any time you’re in public, you are more than likely being photographed – from multiple angles. Your mobile phone has many types of radio frequency transmitters announcing your exact location within a few meters at all times – not to mention your browsing and purchase behavior – all tracked 24/7.
We feel the value of opting-in to face ID systems will outweigh any perceived privacy risk, but as with any new technology, acceptance begins slowly and most analysts agree wider acceptance will grow rapidly over the next 12-18 months.
To address this issue and in planning for use cases, we’ve partnered with a leading biometric technology developer that serves clients in the EU preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
In order for GDPR to deliver on its premise without ensuing chaos, discrete power over an individual’s personal information must be restored to that person. Marketers will now need your permission to take virtually any action with your personal data and have the burden to prove they received your permission, required for every action.
Real-time authentication and opt-in, based on predefined parameters, and using a combination of the smart handset and biometric authentication, allows for frictionless marketing and transactions to occur while protecting PII.
When you break down our technology, you’re essentially converting your facial features into a unique numeric sequence – much like a bar code or a thumbprint. Our faces become the barcode and, through managing permission access to PII profiles, allow us to receive the convenience benefits with an added layer of authentication – our face.
What prompted you to join DPAA?
Imageonix is new to the DOOH space, so we considered it vital to engage with an organization that could help guide us and introduce us to the right partners. Our company leads strategy globally for Ayonix in the media and entertainment category and we’re very excited to be participating in an organization like DPAA that is bringing together partners from media, tech, agency, property, capital, etc., in order to achieve big-picture objectives.