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While China is ahead of the rest of the world in incorporating facial recognition technology into the daily lives of its inhabitants, some of the country's systems need to be fine-tuned.
The recent experience of Dong Mingzhu, president of China's largest air-conditioner manufacturer Gree Electric Appliances, revealed that her face was splashed on a large screen erected along a street in the port city of Ningbo and displaying images of people caught Jaywalking by surveillance cameras.
The artificial intelligence-based surveillance system, however, made a mistake by capturing Dong's image Wednesday in an ad placed on the side of a bus in motion.
The traffic police of Ningbo, a city in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, quickly recognized the mistake by writing in an article on the Sina Weibo microblog on Wednesday that she had deleted the photo. He also indicated that the monitoring system would be fully upgraded to reduce incidents of false recognition in the future.
Gree felt no discomfort, thanking the Ningbo Traffic Police for her hard work in a Sina Weibo message the same day. The Shenzhen-listed company also urged citizens to follow traffic rules to keep streets safe.
A spokesman for Gree said the company did not have any other comments to make about the incident.
Since last year, many cities in China have cracked down on jaywalking by investing in advanced facial recognition systems and surveillance cameras powered by AI. The Jaywalkers are identified and ashamed by posting their photographs on large public screens.
Leading cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have been among the first to use these systems to help regulate traffic and identify drivers who violate the rules of the road.
From travel to retail to banking, Chinese facial recognition systems are now part of everyday life
Plans are also underway to engage mobile network operators and the country's social media platforms, such as WeChat of Tencent Holdings and Sina Weibo, to set up a system in which offenders will receive personal text messages as soon as they will be taken into offense.
Certainly, facial recognition systems – biometric computer applications that identify a person from a database of digital images – are also used in China in various sectors. With the help of sophisticated AI algorithms, Chinese technology companies and other large companies have adopted facial recognition systems in retail services, travel services and financial services.
China tests face recognition at Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge border crossing
The Chinese government is currently working to combine the operations of more than 170 million public security cameras to strengthen the capacity of its surveillance network to track and monitor the 1.4 billion citizens of the country. IHS research company Markit has estimated that the number of surveillance cameras in China could reach 450 million by 2020.
While Chinese citizens have expressed privacy concerns, China's broader initiative to become a global leader in AI has pushed local governments and police services across the country to adopt face recognition technology as an important tool in public safety efforts.
For the latest news from the South China Morning Post, download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.
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