BEIJING: In the crackdown on crime and dissent, Chinese Police have beenprovided with sunglasses that come complete with facial-recognitionfeatures capable of picking a suspect out from a crowd.
The facial recognition software is equipped with powerful advanced opticsand networking to pinpoint potential suspects – even in crowded subways andshopping malls.
The glasses feed a constant stream of images back to a processor attachedto the officer’s uniform webbing.
It captures faces as they turn towards the camera, applying a standardisedset of measurements to each face before comparing it with a portabledatabase in much the same way fingerprints are assessed, the reports said.
According to the China News Service, the glasses have already beensuccessfully trialed by four officers on Zhengzhou city’s East Railwayduring the Chinese New Year celebrations.
The sunglasses with built-in facial recognition capabilities have come as abig help to the law enforcement agencies in China for monitoring dissentand overall surveillance.
The sunglasses have been built by Beijing-based LLVision Technology Co. WuFei, the company’s chief executive, had said that LLVision has worked withlocal police to develop the technology to suit their needs.
People’s Daily, China’s official state newspaper, also claimed that sincethe beginning of the Lunar New Year, the police at Zhengzhou East RailwayStation have caught at least seven fugitives in connection with majorcriminal cases and identified 26 people attempting to travel using otherpeople’s IDs.
The Zhengzhou East Railway Station is the first to adopt facial recognitionglasses for ID verification.
The station, one of the busiest in China, has its own police force. Infact, almost four million people will travel through there throughout theLunar New Year holiday.
China has recently invested hundreds of billions of dollars into developingvarious advanced tracking technologies, building artificial intelligence toidentify individuals and digitally tail them around cities.
According to one estimate, China will possibly have more than 600 millionCCTV cameras by 2020, with Chinese tech startups outfitting them withadvanced features like gait recognition.