Four companies, including banking group Resona Holdings Inc. and electronics giant Panasonic Corp., said Monday that they will work together to put into practical use a payment platform using facial recognition technology. Resona, Panasonic, credit card firm JCB Co. and Dai Nippon Printing Co. aim to introduce a system to allow customers to deposit, withdraw and transfer money at banks using only facial recognition technology for identification as early as fiscal 2022, staring next April. They also hope that the envisaged platform will be used in a wide variety of occasions, such as accommodation check-ins, settlements at retail shops and admission and exit at event venues. They plan to call for companies in different sectors to take part in the initiative. The facial recognition system is expected to verify the users' ID by matching facial images captured mainly by cameras at facilities and the facial images that they have registered to a common server.

Japanese companies have jointly started work to develop high-precision three-dimensional maps that will support autonomous driving technologies. Enhancing the safety of autonomous driving requires more detailed information than the capability of exiting car navigation systems, such as the numbers of traffic lanes and their widths, the locations of traffic lights, utility poles and road signs and the slope angles of roads. The consortium of companies, including Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and map publisher Zenrin Co., aim to complete the development of 3-D map standards by 2020, when the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games will be held. Existing autonomous driving technologies mainly utilize information from sensors and cameras mounted on vehicles. But the sensors and cameras may not be able to detect traffic lanes in certain weather and sunlight conditions.