Axon Enterprise (AAXN), a top body camera supplier to police departments, has reportedly filed patents for facial recognition capabilities, including technology that can determine a person's race, gender and age.
XBut the maker of Taser stun guns and Axon body cameras said Axon is not "actively working on real-time facial identification products" and that the company files patents for new ideas regardless of whether it plans to develop them in the near term.
Axon filed patents in 2016 and 2018 for a video-redaction product that can automatically find and blur out sensitive information recorded on Axon body cameras, according to the Financial Times. It would use facial recognition to black out faces en masse.
A third patent filed in 2017, which is still pending approval, is for real-time video analysis software to identify people captured on a police body camera and in-vehicle cameras using facial recognition.
The filing indicates the technology would also determine a person's race, gender and age, and the application said it would generate a "mathematical description of the person's facial geometries (eg. eye size, eye shape, eye spacing, nose shape, nose length, spacing from nose to eyes, spacing from cheeks to chin)."
Axon Comments On Body Camera, Facial Recognition
"To clarify, Axon is not actively developing technology that can determine a person's race, gender and age," a company spokewoman told IBD via email. "Nor are we developing technology that would match faces captured in police body camera images to police databases. These items are potential uses cases that could be incorporated with the product outlined in the patent. These are not tools that Axon is currently working on."
Axon is currently developing a facial recognition tool that sees if there is a face in a frame and redacts it, but it doesn't identify the individual nor does it recognize race, age, or gender, she added.
In a December blog post, Axon said it is developing algorithms for facial detection, tracking, and re-identification as well as for redaction.
The company added that it's continuing to discuss the development of technologies for vehicle recognition, speech transcription and officer action with its AI & Policing Technology Ethics Board.
Last year, Axon Enterprise CEO Rick Smith said facial recognition technology was not yet accurate enough but added such products could "move into commercialization" once accuracy and privacy concerns abated.
Axon shares rose 2.5% to 60.12 on the stock market today. The stock fell sharply during the market sell-off at the end of 2018, and has yet to fully recover or build a new base. Its relative strength line has been on an upward trend, however. It has also just cleared its 200-day line after retaking its 50-day last week. It has a solid IBD Composite Rating of 86.
Software Service Key To Axon Stock
Dougherty & Co. senior analyst Jeremy Hamblin previously told IBD that boosting the adoption of Evidence.com, Axon's cloud-based digital evidence platform, among police forces is key to the stock going forward.
"When Evidence.com revenue gets to $100 million — and (in 2017) it was about $60 million — there is going to be critical mass where people start to see this no longer as a hardware company that sells Tasers, but it is going to be seen as a software company and it is going to be valued in a different light," Hamblin said.
While software could be its future, Axon's more mature Taser business also is performing well and still provides the bulk of the company's profits.
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