Chinese tourist town uses face recognition as an entry pass
Chinese tourist town uses face recognition as an entry
pass
By Timothy Revell 17 November 2016
Who needs tickets when you have a face? From today, the
ticketed tourist town of Wuzhen in China is using face-recognition technology
to identify people staying in its hotels and to act as their entry pass through
the gates of the attraction.
The system, which is expected to process 5000 visitors a
day, has been created by web giant Baidu – often referred to as the “Chinese
Google”.
Wuzhen is a historic town that has been turned into a
tourist attraction with museums, tours and traditional crafts. When people
check in to hotels in the tourist area, they will now have their pictures taken
and uploaded to a central database. If they leave and re-enter the town, the
face-recognition software will check that they are actually a guest of a hotel
there before allowing them back in.
Previously, multiple types of entry ticket had to be
handed out to distinguish between one-off visitors and those staying for
longer. But the system could easily be exploited, and some guests were caught
sharing their tickets with other people to avoid paying the entry fee.
To prevent this, the town started to use fingerprint
identification for hotel guests, so only one individual could use each entry
pass. “But this took too long,” says Yuanqing Lin, director of the Institute of
Deep Learning at Baidu.
Asking visitors to put their finger on a sensor and wait
for software to verify their identity caused big queues and often resulted in
false positives. The new face-recognition system uses cameras to spot people as
they approach a turnstile at the entry. Faces detected by the camera are
checked against a database of registered visitors, all within a second. If you’re on the database, you’re allowed in;
if not, the doors remain closed.
Facing the cameras
“It was only a matter of time before face-recognition
software was rolled out on this scale,” says Mark Nixon at the University of
Southampton, UK. It’s more convenient to
use your face than tickets, he says, so it’s likely that the technology will
soon be seen elsewhere.
Baidu’s face-recognition software uses neural networks –
a technique inspired by neurons in the brain that helps to recognise complex
patterns. The company has trained the software on huge data sets that together
total more than 1 billion images of people’s faces and says that the system has
an accuracy of 99.8 per cent, although this was achieved by examining still
images rather than people walking up to a camera.
The software also detects facial movements, so can’t be
fooled by someone holding up a still image of another person’s face.
The system is first being used to track the 5000 people
per day staying in hotels in Wuzhen, who make up around 15-20 per cent of the
town’s total visitors. Baidu is already using the software for employee entry
at its Beijing headquarters, but this is the first time it will be rolled out
at such a scale.
Privacy concerns
Some airports already have a form of face-recognition
software at passport control, but the setup is different. At an airport, you
have to present your passport and the software determines whether the person
standing in front of the camera matches that identity. But at the gates of
Wuzhen, no identification is presented: instead, the software searches a large
database for the face staring into the camera.
Compiling a database of faces in this way presents
privacy concerns. Lin says the responsibility for storing the data falls to the
Wuzhen attraction that uses it, not Baidu.
“In China, there is not a single overarching privacy law,
but companies do have obligations to keep data safe,” says Tiffany Li, an
affiliate of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton
University.
Companies around the world are building large databases
of personal information, with some starting to store biometric information such
as fingerprints too. “This will make it easier to log on to your bank, but it
will also be more of an issue if the database is hacked,” says Li.
If the Wuzhen trial is successful, Baidu hopes to operate
similar systems elsewhere, such as at other tourist spots and theme parks. “We
want our software to eventually be used by all of the town’s visitors, and then
in many other places around China,” says Lin.
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