Face recognition system approved
By Wang Zhenghua (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-20 06:46

An independently developed biometric face recognition system has received approval and will be used for public identification, its leading inventor said yesterday.

The invention, developed by Su Guangda, an Electronic Engineering Department professor with Beijing-based Tsinghua University, has been approved by a panel of experts from the Ministry of Public Security.

The system excels at capturing moving facial images and features a multi-camera technology to lower the error for mismatching.

It will be used in public places, such as airports, post offices, customs entrances and even residential communities, in the near future.

Facial recognition systems, which have been subject to increasing discussion in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, are computer-based security systems that are able to automatically detect and identify human faces.

The system extracts the human face from the surroundings and measures nodal points, such as the distance between the eyes, the shape of the cheekbones and other distinguishing features. It then compares them to the nodal points computed from a database of pictures in order to find a match.

Currently, some countries have placed recognition cameras in public places to look for criminal suspects and missing children.

In China it is limited to police use. The technology has helped the police in Beijing solve a few criminal cases involving child abduction and supermarket blackmail in the past few years.

"It has a very promising future for the public use," Su said in a telephone interview yesterday.

For example, residential communities, airports and banks could utilize it to check a person's identity, he said.

"It has a superior advantage compared with fingerprint identification because the country doesn't have a fingerprint database for the general public," he said, adding that there is a photograph on each identification card, which might help establish a facial database easily.

However, like similar systems in other countries, the technology is inherently susceptible to error if the picture is too vague or the person's facial features are influenced by a number of factors, including ageing, expressions, lighting and camera angles. Also, the error rate is likely to rise as the database enlarges.

The professor said his laboratory is working on the problems, even though his system has partly tackled the angle issue by taking pictures with several cameras.

The privacy implication is a further concern. Presently, there is much debate over the use of face recognition and other surveillance technologies.

"As long as you don't save the picture in the computer and just scan individual faces quickly, the privacy violation is not an issue," Su said.

"And we could realize that by avoiding adding a picture saving function to the technology," he said.

(China Daily 02/20/2006 page2)