China’s latest AI champion says technical standards needed for healthy development of facial recognition industry
China is the largest market for facial recognition technologies, with its share of global sales expected to grow from 29.3 per cent last year to 44.6 per cent in 2023
When Xu Li first introduced his facial recognition technology to Chinese immigration officials, some of them seemed out of touch with advances in the technology. “We knew about it 20 years ago and, combined with fingerprint checks, the accuracy is only 53 per cent,” one of them told the chief executive of SenseTime, an artificial intelligence start-up.
That was the equivalent of a coin toss, with a 50/50 chance of getting it right, Xu pointed out to them. Today, SenseTime is a national artificial intelligence (AI) champion and has supplied automatic face scanning systems to more than 40 railway stations and several airports across China, with a near perfect accuracy rate.
Xu said his encounter with bureaucracy highlights a critical issue facing the AI industry today – the lack of technology standards even as the country fully embraces AI-driven identity checks.
“With standards, technology adopters can better understand the risk involved, just like credit worthiness for individuals and companies,” Xu said. “Providers of facial recognition can be assigned different trust levels, ranging from financial security at the top to entertainment uses.”
National standards, based on accepted rules and specifications agreed to by a panel of experts, would allow companies to compete on a level playing field instead of having to meet standards set by individual customers, according to Xu.