China is building the world's most powerful facial recognition system, capable of identifying any of its 1.3 billion citizens in three seconds.The goal is to enable the system to match someone's face with their ID photo with an accuracy of about 90%.The project launched by the Ministry of public security in 2015 is being developed in cooperation with the security company headquartered in Shanghai.

According to people familiar with the project, the system can be connected to network surveillance cameras and will use cloud facilities to connect to data storage and processing centers all over the country.However, some researchers say that due to the technical limitations of face recognition and the huge population base, the research has encountered many difficulties, and it is unclear when the system will be completed.Currently, similar systems operate at smaller levels, including police databases and urban or provincial ID pools.

But these operations are separate and much smaller.The core data is built for the national system, including the portrait information of each Chinese citizen, reaching 13tb.According to the technical documents on the Department's website and the documents written by police researchers, the size of a complete database with detailed personal information does not exceed 90 TB.

Chen Jiansheng, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Tsinghua University, said that the system will reach an unprecedented construction scale because no country has a larger population than China.He said the system was being developed for security and government use, such as tracking wanted suspects and public administration. Commercial applications that use information from the database will not comply with current regulations."However, due to the economic development and the increase of social demand, policies will also change," he said. Through appropriate regulations, the business sector can access the database, so as to create new business opportunities.

Chinese enterprises have pushed the commercial application of facial recognition technology to a new level.Smiling or blinking at the camera, students can now enter the classroom, passengers can board the plane without boarding pass, diners can buy a meal in KFC, and brush their faces in the canteen mentioned at the beginning of the article.Some other restaurants even rank looks by machines according to an algorithm, thus offering discounts to customers. Customers with "beautiful" features (such as symmetrical features) get higher scores, so meals will be cheaper.

Some public toilets in Beijing also use facial recognition, so that the automatic paper feeder will provide toilet paper to those who need paper more than once in a given time.Facial recognition can also replace other personal identification methods used to make payments, such as scanning fingerprints or QR codes on mobile phones.But the government's project has aroused controversy among AI experts. Cheng Mingming, Professor of computer science at Tianjin Nankai University, said that although the scale of the project is expanding, technological progress means that all information can be stored in small portable drives, increasing the risk of data theft.

He said that now the handheld commercial hard disk can store more than 10TB of data. You can pack it in your suitcase and board the plane. "If facial data and related personal information are stolen and placed on the Internet, it will cause great problems.For example, due to the rapid development of face recognition technology, a person or organization can take photos and identify strangers at a party or on the street without their knowledge.But security company I, which works with the Ministry of public security, rejected the possibility. The company said that "downloading the whole data is as difficult as using a nuclear warhead to launch a missile. Several senior officials need to insert and turn the key at the same time."

The 1.36 billion face recognition system was developed by isvision, a security company located in Shanghai.The South China Morning Post confirmed to isvision that it won the bid last year and signed the contract, but declined to provide details. "The progress of the development is confidential. At present, we have no publicly disclosed information," said a company spokesman.According to the company's website, as early as 2003, a TV security camera with facial recognition capability was first deployed in Tiananmen Square. The system is connected with the police suspect database and can identify and track potential targets in a large number of people.

According to fan Yin, a researcher at Beijing population management research center, the project team has encountered "unprecedented challenges" due to the government's high requirements for speed and accuracy.When inputting photos, gender and age range, the system needs to find a match within 3 seconds, with an accuracy of more than 88%.Fan and colleagues tested the face recognition algorithm developed by Tsinghua University. They were disappointed with the results, and Tsinghua University is the world leader in this research field.

They found that the accuracy of the photos that best matched the face they were looking for was less than 60%. In the top 20 tests, the accuracy remained below 70%, fan and his collaborators reported in a paper published in the domestic Journal of Electronic Science and technology in May."It doesn't solve the problem of real-world applications," they added.The system developed by isvision will use an algorithm developed by seettech, which was founded by several researchers from the Institute of computing technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Seetatech confirmed its participation in the national facial recognition project to the South China Morning Post, but declined to comment further. Researchers familiar with the project said that some huge technical obstacles still exist. The researchers said: "among the 1.3 billion people, some unrelated people look too similar, even their parents are difficult to distinguish.""At present, access to the database is limited to several security companies that work closely with the Ministry of public security." more access will certainly lead to a higher risk of data leakage. "Researchers warn that the convenience of facial recognition may come at the expense of safety in daily life.