Chinese Surveillance System Can Detect Who You Are Within A Second, Even When You're Wearing A Mask

These days, it’s obviously hard to find a Chinese without a face mask even when he’s either at home or on the street due to the COVID-19 nightmare that has taken over the country for months. Despite the medical support face masks are bringing, the Chinese government could feel a bit annoyed as its public surveillance system struggles to identify people. However, a Beijing-based company named Hanwang Technology now appears to tackle this mind-boggling problem for authorities.

The company trains this advanced facial recognition system by using a sample database of both unmasked faces and masked ones. A team of 20 engineers spent just one month on developing the technology before rolling it out to the public.

Talking about the mechanism of this system, Hanwang VP Huang Lei stated that once it gets paired with a temperature sensor, it’ll collect the temperature stats to detect their identification and would process the result if the recorded temperature excesses 38 degrees.

There’re two main product types released by the company at present: “Single channel” and “Multi-channel” recognition system. As the names suggest, the first one is suitable for keeping track of people at office buildings whereas the other can be used for “multiple surveillance cameras” and it takes only “a second” to identify an individual in a crowd, according to Huang.

At least 200 clients in China have employed the system for similar purposes, and the Ministry of Public Security undoubtedly is the biggest customer that runs it in a wide geographical area.

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