China: Hanwang Technology says it has developed country's first facial recognition technology to identify mask wearers
“Even mask-wearers can be ID'd, China facial recognition firm says”, 9 March 2020
A Chinese company says it has developed the country’s first facial recognition technology that can identify people when they are wearing a mask, as most are these days because of the coronavirus, and help in the fight against the disease…
… Hanwang Technology Ltd, which also goes by the English name Hanvon, said it has come up technology that can successfully recognize people even when they are wearing masks.
“If connected to a temperature sensor, it can measure body temperature while identifying the person’s name, and then the system would process the result, say, if it detects a temperature over 38 degrees,” Hanwang Vice President Huang Lei told Reuters in an interview…
The team began work on the system in January, as the coronavirus outbreak gathered pace, and began rolling it out to the market after just a month.
It sells two main types of products that use the technology. One performs “single channel” recognition that is best used at, for example, entrances to office buildings.
The other, more powerful, product is a “multi-channel” recognition system that uses “multiple surveillance cameras”.
It can identify everyone in a crowd of up to 30 people “within a second”, Huang says.
“When wearing a mask, the recognition rate can reach about 95%, which can ensure that most people can be identified,” Huang said, adding the success rate for people without mask is about 99.5%.
A big customer… is the Ministry of Public Security, which runs the police…
But the system struggles to identify people with both a mask and sunglasses, he said…
The company has about 200 clients in Beijing using the technology, including the police, and expect scores more across 20 provinces to start installing it soon, Huang said…
When it comes to other surveillance tools being used in the fight against the coronavirus, there has been some grumbling on social media but most people seem to be accepting extra intrusion, or even embracing it, as a means to deal with the health emergen