A face in the crowd

Police are already using frontier technologies such as drones, 3-D printing and cloud computing in the fight against crime, and now it's the turn of face-recognition technology. While criminals are busy using technology to try and hack into bank accounts, the police are watching them via cameras distributed throughout cities.

"If you have watched the US TV series Person of Interest, you may have been astonished by face-recognition technology that can recognize a mobile image in an open environment in real time. Although the current technology is still limited to the amount of light that falls on the monitored object and its orientation, real-time monitoring technology as described on the program is not far-fetched," said Mei Lin, director of the Cyber Physical System R&D Center at the Ministry of Public Security's Third Research Institute.

In October, the use of face-recognition technology allowed police in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province, to detain a suspected thief in just 10 minutes.