Soon you'll be able to check the mood of your partner sitting across the table at breakfast with your smartphone, thanks to the advance in facial recognition technology.

This technology, based on computing vision and artificial intelligence, is widely used in high-end smartphones, such as iPhone X and Samsung's S series, to unlock phones and authenticate mobile payment transactions. Industry experts expect many lower-end phones to incorporate the technology in the years ahead.

In future, such technology, combined with new algorithms and high-definition cameras, can be set to do a lot more, offering unlimited opportunities for Hong Kong entrepreneurs to explore because the required hardware solutions, their major weakness, can be easily sourced from the Chinese mainland and elsewhere.

For instance, taking a peep at someone's emotional state has much wider applications than personal relationship. A supermarket would like to use this technology to see customers' emotional reaction to different displays or at the checkout counters.

There's already a new crop of startups offering emotional detection for security or other purposes. A British firm WeSee claimed that its AI technology can spot suspicious behavior by reading facial cues otherwise imperceptible to the eye, according to a BBC report.

"Using only low-quality video footage, our technology has the ability to determine an individual's state of mind or intent through their facial expressions, posture, gestures and movement," said WeSee's chief executive David Fulton.

The increasingly wide application of facial recognition technology is spurring research and development. For instance, a facial recognition system has been installed at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen boundary to help speed up immigration and customs clearance at the checkpoints that handle an average of 650,000 crossings every day.

Indeed, more smartphone manufacturers are set to adopt such technology to unlock phones and effect mobile payments. There's still plenty of room for improvement, such as 3-D processing, to prevent the system from being fooled by photos. This is an area that Hong Kong can compete in without the need for government subsidies or land grants.

(HK Edition 07/27/2018 page10)