TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Japan's NEC Corporation announced on Monday (Oct. 19) that it had developed a new facial recognition engine that can detect masked faces and pick up exposed features to achieve 99.9-percent accuracy in verification.

NEC said that it has been developing technology that can identify people while they wear face masks for years; however, the newest engine was specially designed with face masks in mind, according to a press release. The company said that the new engine focuses on detecting facial features not covered by masks, such as eyes.

Internal evaluations have so far shown the engine to be highly accurate, NEC said, adding that regardless of the color and pattern of masks, the engine can achieve verification at rates of 99.9 percent and higher.

In November, the company will start selling the facial recognition engine and compatible products, including Enhanced Video Analytics and the multimodal biometric authentication solution Bio-IDiom. The market will initially be limited to Japan, according to a Liberty Times report.