China is building the world’s most powerful facial-recognition system with the power to identify any one of its 1.3 billion citizens within three seconds.

China is building the world’s most powerful facial-recognition system with the power to identify any one of its 1.3 billion citizens within three seconds.

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The goal is for the system to able to match someone’s face to their ID photo with about 90 percent accuracy.   The project, launched by the Ministry of Public Security in 2015, is under development in conjunction with a security company based in Shanghai.

The system can be connected to surveillance camera networks and will use cloud facilities to connect with data storage and processing centers distributed across the country, according to people familiar with the project.

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There is also a national database of police suspects and persons of interest to the government.  These may continue to be used independently after the national system is established.

The core data set for the national system, containing the portrait information of each Chinese citizen, amounts to 13 terabytes.

Chen Jiansheng, an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University and a member of the ministry’s Committee of Standardization – which oversees technical developments in police forces – said the system would have to be built on an unprecedented scale because no country has a population as big as China’s.

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Giving commercial sectors access to the database under proper regulation would create new business opportunities by helping to improve customer service, he said.

Chinese companies are already taking the commercial application of facial recognition technology to new heights.

With a smile or blink of the eyes to a camera, students can now enter their university halls, travellers can board planes without using a boarding pass and diners can pay for a meal at KFC.

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Some public lavatories in Beijing also use facial recognition so that the automatic dispensing machines will deny toilet paper to people who ask for it more than once within a given period.

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Facial recognition could supersede other personal identification methods that are used to make payments such as scanning fingerprints or QR codes on a mobile phone.

The researcher warned that the cost of the convenience facial recognition could bring to everyday life was “sacrificing security”.

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