Move over humans, this startup is making facial recognition for pets

Megvii says it can identify individual dogs by scanning their noses

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Move over humans, this startup is making facial recognition for pets

Published: 6:44pm, 12 Jul 2019Updated: 9:09am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

If you’re a dog lover, you probably don’t need convincing that your furry friend is like no other. But just how exactly can you tell two pups apart? AI startup Megvii says they have an answer.

The company, known better as a supplier of facial recognition surveillance software to the Chinese government, is now dabbling in biometric recognition for animals. But rather than scanning the whole face of a dog, it focuses solely on one feature: The nose.

(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba -- a backer of Megvii.)

The technology is based on the idea that dogs are discernable by their nose prints, similar to how smartphones or law enforcement agencies use fingerprints to identify humans. Unlike the more prevalent identification method of chip implants, Megvii says nose printing is cheaper and less invasive.

Kennel clubs around the world are already known to register nose prints to locate lost or stolen dogs. One primitive way to take a nose print is by coating the nose with ink and pressing it against white cardboard.

Megvii’s method, however, doesn’t require smearing your dog’s snout. Just point your phone’s camera at the nose and the system will be able to locate key identifying markers, creating a unique profile of your dog in the database.

That would seem to require high-resolution images of your dog’s nose. Still, the company says using this method, it can verify a dog’s identity against an existing record with 95% accuracy. It also says the system can be used to identify a dog with “high precision” by checking it against records from a larger database, although the company didn’t elaborate on the accuracy rate in that scenario.