NEC entered into a strategic collaboration with Arm to drive the development of secure AI-based IoT products for smart cities. As part of addressing issues related to ensuring the security of IoT devices, NEC will adopt the Arm Platform Security Architecture (PSA), an industry standard framework for building securely connected devices, which includes the concept of threat modeling, architectural guidelines and implementation resources that are meant to reduce the cost, complexity, and risk associated with IoT security.

NEC is also slated to unveil the development of a box-type accelerator, a specialised device featuring real-time facial recognition that will be securely managed and provisioned by Arm Pelion Device Management. This accelerator will be equipped with the Arm Cortex-A53 processor. It will accelerate the device’s facial recognition process and enable faster analytics by offloading the analytics workload carried out on servers or the cloud, thereby helping to reduce costs for networks and systems.

NEC has already begun creating a Smart City project leveraging Arm technology in the resort town of Shirahama in western Japan. NEC aims to start a proof of concept hospitality project with Smart Check-In and Smart Shopping features in December. These services are expected to enable visitors to check-in to hotel rooms and make cashless payments through the use of facial authentication. The project includes facial recognition with the new accelerator and is expected to be a reference model for expansion into a wide range of new areas.