Working in one of the world’s most densely populated countries, Chinese police officers need all the help they can get when it comes to searching for criminal suspects.
Police are currently testing mobile facial recognition units mounted on eyeglasses during the Lunar New Year at train stations in Zhengzhou, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
Similar in appearance to Google Glass, the glasses relay images to a mobile device that contains a database of suspected criminals. The glasses are said to be capable of identifying individuals from a 10,000-person database within one-tenth of a second.
Because the glasses are connected directly to a mobile device that contains an offline database of criminals, the process is quicker than surveillance cameras which pull their data from a vast database in the cloud.
A local media outlet claims the glasses have already caught 33 suspects.
It gives police “the ability to check anywhere,” Wu Fei, chief executive at LLVision, the company behind the eyeglasses, told the WSJ. “By making wearable glasses, with AI on the front end, you get instant and accurate feedback. You can decide right away what the next interaction is going to be.”
Of course, a piece of technology this invasive is bound to bring up privacy concerns. “The potential to give individual police officers facial recognition technology in sunglasses could eventually make China’s surveillance state all the more ubiquitous,” William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International, told the WSJ.
While this type of surveillance technology would be a tough sell in the United States, it’s par for the course in China. Check out what life is like in China’s total surveillance state in the video below.
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