‘Minority Report’ Artificial Intelligence machine can identify 2 BILLION people in seconds
‘Minority Report’ Artificial Intelligence machine can
identify 2 BILLION people in seconds
A LEADING tech company has developed an Artificial
Intelligence machine that can identify two billion people in a matter of
seconds.
By Rachel O'Donoghue / Published 12th December 2017
Yitu Technology has made an AI algorithm that can connect
to millions of surveillance cameras and instantly recognise people.
The company – based in Shanghai, China – developed
Dragonfly Eye to scan through millions of photographs that have been logged in
the country’s national database.
This means it has a collection of 1.8 billion photos on
file, including visitors to the country and those taken at ports and airports.
It may also have access to the photos of every one of
Hong Kong’s identity card holders, although Yitu has refused to confirm this.
The cutting-edge technology is now being used track down
criminals, with the early stages of use showing it has been a hugely
successful.
“Our machines can very easily recognise you among at
least 2 billion people in a matter of seconds,” Yitu chief executive and
co-founder, Zhu Long, told the South China Morning Post.
“Which would have been unbelievable just three years
ago.”
It is reported that on the first day Dragonfly Eye was in
operation in Shanghai’s Metro, it was able to track a man wanted by cops and
sent police to his exact location.
A further 567 suspected criminals were nabbed on the
city’s subway system.
Zhu continued: “Let’s say that we live in Shanghai, a
city of 24 million people.
“It’s challenging for the government to police such a
large population. And it would be impossible without technology. Even when we
have many cameras installed, it’s a hard task.
“You can’t watch all the videos, and doing a search is
very time-consuming and requires too many resources to get meaningful results
from such a huge amount of data. But artificial intelligence can do it easily,
and by using existing infrastructure.”
And the future of the Dragonfly technology doesn’t stop
at catching criminals.
It is thought it could be used to identify people at ATM
machines in the future, making carrying a bank card a thing of the past.
He added: “People waste time discussing whether it’s all
hype or the real thing, but facial recognition already shows how real it can
get. In 2015, AI had already beaten humans in face-verification tasks.
“Our algorithm is more accurate than customs officials at
telling whether two images show the same person. It can even find a subject
among millions of others using a 25 or 30-year-old image.
“And in the past two years, the performance of machines
has increased by 1,000 times.”
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