China introduces experimental face recognition system when paying for subway fares

Celestial - a very high-tech state. Yes, the country is scolded for devil-may-care attitude to the inviolability of private information, which is collected by a variety of methods. But this can hardly be done in the near foreseeable future.



In the meantime, China is introducing a variety of citizen identification systems. Some of them are united in a single network, some - not yet. Among other systems, you can recall the video surveillance of students in schools with the involvement of AI in analyzing the behavior of children and adolescents, face detection for detecting traffic offenders, face recognition by the police, social rating system and much more. Now another system has been added - face recognition in the subway . The technology is used for quick payment of fare.



The system does not work everywhere until the pilot project was launched only in the Shenzhen subway. And here is not one technological innovation, but several at once. In addition, in fact, face recognition in the metro works and the fifth generation mobile network - without it, the data simply would not have time to be transmitted to remote servers, where information is processed.

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So, a resident of Shenzhen to pay for travel must go to a special display and stand for a couple of seconds while the system identifies the person. However, before that it is necessary to create a benchmark - a photograph that will serve as a computer guide. The passenger makes a reference photo, it is loaded into the database, and then the system will be able to recognize this person every time he goes down the subway.



You must also specify a name and link a travel account from which funds will be deducted. So far it is unclear how complex this system is - most likely, the technical infrastructure is exactly as described above. A display with a camera that captures the face -> server with a reference photo -> account, to which this photo is “tied”.



It all works quickly, so even if all the passengers in the subway want to use the new system, there will be no crowds. A couple of seconds - and the passenger can go to the station.



The project in question was developed jointly with Huawei - this company created software that is the basis of the system. Unfortunately, it is not clear whether this system will be expanded to all Shenzhen subways (so far it only works at several stations), not to mention other cities in China.



As mentioned above, face recognition for the Middle Kingdom is not a novelty at all. For example, even in KFC , such a system is used , it has been operating since 2017.



Interestingly, China is ahead of the rest of the world in terms of the development of mobile payments. About half of citizens use their phones and smartphones for micropayments. They are carried out by processing WeChat Pay or Alipay. Some residents do not use cash at all, so the Central Bank of China even warned the shops not to think about refusing to accept payments in the form of a cache, otherwise the company faces a large fine. And the problem is that buyers simply do not leave cash, so there is simply nothing to give change.