(Newswire.net — February 15, 2018) –The Chinese new year begins on February 16.
Many have made plans to celebrate and travel to China, and there is an estimate of 3 billion trips taking place during the Lunar New Year Festivities.
It would be an understatement to say that the Chinese government is unrepaired.
Police officers are being issued glasses that are capable of facial recognition.
Zhengzhou East Railway Station in the central Henan Province is being used as a testing site, since almost four million people are estimated to pass through the station during the holiday season.
The glasses have already proved themselves effective and have led to the identification and subsequent arrests of several dozen people, many of them traveling with false travel documentation.
The company behind the glasses is LLVision Tech from Beijing, and they have been working with Chinese police for more than a year on the development of the new technology. If you are looking for cheap prescription glasses online, this is not what we are talking about.
LLV Tech CEO Wu Fei claims that the software can process 100,000 faces a second. This is possible due to the fact that the glasses are connected to an offline device that stores a database of images, rather than having to connect to an online cloud.
Another advantage of the glasses compared to regular CCTV cameras is that the location of a regular monitoring camera is static, while a police officer can follow targets and check anywhere. Wu Fei stated “By making wearable glasses, with AI on the front end, you get instant and accurate feedback.”
Even without this new technology China is already considered a surveillance state.
The Xinjiang region in western China has a Muslim-majority population. There has been a major increase in the number of police officers in the region, and almost 5 percent of the adult population has already been to, or is attending political re-educational centers, that are more akin to prisons.
In 2017 China had an already impressive 176 million CCTV cameras being used for surveillance, making it the world’s largest monitoring network. They plan to increase the number of cameras to 626 million by 2020.
China has also been putting together a biometric database of its citizens.
The goal of these measures is to produce a surveillance network that is capable of identifying and locating any citizen within a matter of seconds.