Metalenz Partners with Samsung on Facial Recognition Tech

Metalenz will use Samsung Electronics’ ISOCELL Vizion 931 technology as the image sensor component for its "Polar ID" imaging system. Metalenz offers the solution for facial biometrics. The partnership with Samsung provides manufacturing scale to drive rapid adoption of the technology within the smartphone industry, Metalenz said, and that Polar ID is under early evaluation with several leading smartphone OEMs.

The imaging system is to specifically combine Metalenz’s polarization-sensitive meta-optic with a derivative of the ISOCELL Vizion 931 image sensor to capture polarized images in the near-IR with advanced global shutter technology. The ISOCELL Vizion 931 achieves 60% quantum efficiency at 850-nm infrared light wavelength and 38% at 940 nm. According to Metalenz, the Polar ID system enables authentication using a single image, while providing a 50% size and cost reduction over traditional facial authentication technologies, which require multiple images.

Metalenz’s polarization meta-optics on chip. The company has established a partnership with Samsung to use the ISOCELL Vizion 931 image sensor in its Polar ID facial recognition system. Courtesy of Metalenz.

“Leveraging the performance and scale of Samsung’s ISOCELL Vizion 931 image sensor allows our Polar ID cameras to quickly and efficiently determine the polarization information in a scene, from which our imaging algorithms and machine learning models authenticate the Polar ID images,” said Rob Devlin, Metalenz CEO and cofounder.