China is reportedly building the world’s most powerful facial recognition system which aims to identify any one of its 1.4 billion citizens within three seconds.
The main goal is for the system to match someone’s face to their ID photo 90 per cent of the time.
The project, launched by the Ministry of Public Security in 2015, is in development and collaborating with a security company based in Shanghai.
A customer pays for goods using an app which can recognize its facial identity (file photo)
A Chinese teacher uses facial recognition technology to check the ID students (file photo)
According to the South China Morning Post, the 1.4 billion-person facial recognition system is being developed by Isvision, which told the newspaper it had won the contract last year.
The company declined to provide details.
Isvision security cameras with facial recognition capabilities were first used in Tiananmen Square as early as 2003, according to the company’s website. The political ‘hot-spot’ is situated close to government buildings and remains under heavy security.
Fast: An ATM using facial recognition software can be used for withdrawing cash (file photo)
The company’s systems are connected to the police database of suspects, capable of recognising and tracking potential targets in a large crowd.
Experts have said the new nation-wide system is being developed for the same reasons.
The huge system will be connected to surveillance CCTV networks.
Chinese staff look into facial recognition devices as they enter their workplace (file photo)
It will make use of cloud facilities to connect to data storage and processing centres across China.
However, the project, said the South China Morning Post, faces challenging technological hurdles given the technical limits of facial recognition technology and China’s huge population.
Fan Ying, a researcher at Ministry of Public Security’s population management research centre, said to the newspaper that the project team has ‘unprecedented challenges’ due to the government’s demands for speed and accuracy.
Tests carried out using the facial recognition algorithm achieved only an accuracy rate of below 60 per cent, lower than the 88 per cent target.
There are also concerns about possible security breaches and privacy issues.
Professor Cheng Mingming, a professor at Nankai University in Tianjin, said to the South China Morning Post that despite the size of the project, technological developments mean that all the information can be stored in small, portable drives and this increases the risk of data theft.
An ATM using facial recognition rather than using a bank card to withdraw money (file photo)
At the moment there are similar systems which operate on a smaller scale. They include the police’s database of criminal suspects and identity databases at the city or provincial government level.
Chen Jiansheng, a professor at the department of electrical engineering at Tsinghua University, said to the South China Morning Post the system would have to be built on an unprecedented scale because no country had a population as big as China’s.
The size of the new database, which stores portrait and detailed information of every Chinese citizen, does not exceed 90 terabytes, according to the ministry’s website and a paper written by police researchers.