Spurred by two federal antiterrorism statutes, the Commerce Department has released a study showing that face-recognition technology is hitting its stride.

The Face Recognition Vendor Test 2002 (FRVT 2002) looked at 10 companies' work on face recognition and said they had made "significant advances" on the state of the art.

"The performance results...show an improvement in the capabilities of the face-recognition systems over the last two years," concludes the report released this month. "On comparable experiments in...2000, there has been a 50 percent reduction in error rates."

The team that produced the report included a slew of government agencies. Evaluators included scientists from the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which issued the report; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Department's Counterdrug Technology Development Program Office. Other sponsors of the report include the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice, the State Department, the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI.

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