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from the throw-away-your-makeup-and-forget-that-diet dept.
Darren Pauli at El Reg reports
Chinese researchers have developed a facial recognition system that can pick faces from a crowd with 99.8 percent accuracy from 91 angles. The platform can distinguish between identical twins, unravel layers of makeup and still identify an individual if they've packed on or shed kilos.
Researcher Zhou Xi of the Chinese Academy of Science told local reporters [Google translation] the system would be built into a [mobile] app next year.
"The facial recognition system is not only accurate but also quick to recognise," Xi said.
The platform which is limited use (sic) in China topped Carnegie Mellon University's global standards beating the previous accuracy record of 97.6 percent.
It was trained against a database sporting 50 million Chinese faces compiled with help from the University of Illinois and the National University of Singapore.
The biometrics system comes as Australia's Immigration Minister Scott Morrison announced facial recognition Smart Gates would be installed at departure areas within the nation's airports.
The systems already in place at arrival points work by matching Aussie or Kiwi passports against a stored photo and dramatically cut down on Customs wait times, much to this correspondent's delight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16 2014, @02:36PM
> Before anyone goes off saying that they all look the same,
They do all look the same, to someone who isn't used to looking at chinese faces.
Same thing about white people, their faces all look the same to someone who isn't used to looking at caucasian faces.
It isn't an issue of racism, it is an issue of people's brains not having enough practice to be able to look past the broadly common features of any ethnic group in order to see the subtle variations.
That said, I totaly disbelieve this story. Off-angle facial recognition is really hard. Even humans have a ~20% error rate comparing faces to photo-id's and those are under near ideal conditions. The only way I would believe this algorithm gets those kinds of accuracy numbers is if it works like facebook's "deepface" software which relies on social graphs in order to narrow the search space down to just a handful.