Facial recognition glasses help in Chinese surveillance during parliament meeting

Record ID: 1107060

  • Title: Facial recognition glasses help in Chinese surveillance during parliament meeting
  • Date: 10th March 2018
  • Summary: BEIJING, CHINA (RECENT - FEBRUARY 28, 2018) (REUTERS) FACE RECOGNITION GLASSES CEO OF LLVISION WU FEI PICKING UP GLASSES WU PUTTING ON GLASSES (SOUNDBITE) (Mandarin) CEO OF LLVISION WU FEI, SAYING: "First of all, we trust the government. This is the first thing. Secondly, it is not a function that the hardware can realize, but in fact, it needs a back-end (support). The go
  • Embargoed: 24th March 2018 05:20
  • Keywords: FACE RECOGNITION GLASSES NPC CHINA AI POLICE
  • Location: BEIJING, CHINA
  • City: BEIJING, CHINA
  • Country: China
  • Topics: Defence,Government/Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA00386EPR9H
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: As China's rubber stamp parliament convenes this week in a heavily secured Beijing, increasing amounts of high-tech gadgets from glasses with in-built facial recognition to phone scanners and robots will be on display to help maintain security and track troublemakers.
    The increased use of technology underscores a major drive under President Xi Jinping to beef up the country's surveillance tech amid a sweeping crackdown on dissidents.
    Xi is expected to cement his power base this week and push through reforms to remove term limits that would in effect allow him to stay in his post indefinitely.
    One of the companies helping add a sci-fi edge to the proceedings is LLVision, which said its eye glasses would be used around the meeting and could help security forces identify suspicious people and vehicles in real-time.
    Though critics say the an authoritarian government aided by state of art surveillance technology can send a chilling effect to any dissidents, and triggers debate on whether there might be an intrusion of people's privacy, Wu Fei, CEO of Beijing-based LLVision, said there is very next to zero chance of privacy intrusion as companies are not allowed to touch the data, and the technologies are only used for noble cause, which is to catch fugitives and suspects.
    "First of all, we trust the government. This is the first thing. Secondly, it is not a function that the hardware can realize, but in fact, it needs a back-end (support). The government has a very strict control on the back-end, which includes the use of the data. Actually it (the AI technology) has always been regulated in acceptable areas, and we are comfortable with this," said Wu.
    The glasses, that might seem more at home in a futuristic dystopian film than in Beijing's historic Tiananmen Square, detect faces and match them against a police database.
    The eyeglasses, which have been put into use by police since 2016 but were only recently touted by state media, have been utilized by authorities in at least seven provinces in the country, said Wu.
    The eyeglasses are just one of the technologies deployed in China that aim to strengthen the state's grip on power and weed out any risks to its stability.
    Facial scanners, VR camera-equipped police dogs, and omnipresent police cameras, increasingly equipped with capabilities to identify people by their facial features and the way they walk, are already constantly making the headlines.
    The company is also working on a few national research projects, including a platform for the military.
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