“The country on the cutting edge of facial recognition technology and the amazing ways it can be put to use is definitely China. While the Chinese government and many of the country’s current systems, large population (more than 1.3 billion citizens) and centralized identity data bases might make adopting facial recognition technology easier than in Europe or the United States, Chinese-based technology companies are also leaders in investing and building useful innovations to find new ways to profit from the use of computer vision. Unlike your fingerprint, your faceprint can be scanned at a distance. Your individual faceprint is a unique code that is applicable to you. It’s created by measuring distances between points on your face such as the width of your nose or the distance between your eyes. These various points are called ‘nodal points’ and about 80 of them are used to create your faceprint. Once a faceprint is made, it is run through identity databases to connect the face to a name in the database. The Chinese Ministry of Public Security began its quest to build the world’s most extensive facial recognition database in 2015. The error rates of the technology can be as low as 0.8 percent; eight out of 1,000 scans could be misidentified.”
Outlets for this technology include the obvious like security and law enforcement, but also payment portals and financial transactions (“smile to pay”), travel and hospitality, and more.
Source: The Amazing Ways Facial Recognition AIs Are Used In China
