DeepGlint: the Chinese AI firm that helped police catch a criminal who had been on the run for 20 years
- Company says its system – inspired by structure of human eye – can capture images of, and identify, individuals and vehicles as far away as 50 metres
Trying to find a criminal on the run among 1.4 billion people is a perennial challenge for China’s law enforcement agencies.
Recently a cluster of AI-enabled facial recognition technology companies have emerged in China to lend a helping hand though. Beijing-based DeepGlint Technology is one of them and even helped police authorities track down a criminal who had been evading justice for 20 years.
Sequoia-backed DeepGlint specialises in the field of computer vision, which involves the automatic extraction, analysis and understanding of useful information from a single image or sequence of images.
The company says its system – inspired by the structure of the human eye – can capture images of, and identify, individuals and vehicles as far away as 50 metres, alerting authorities if there is suspicious activity. Its 3D image analysis and pattern recognition technology has led to the arrest of 100 suspects, it says.
More controversially, perhaps, its technology has also been used to identify targets in the Xinjiang autonomous region where the government has been accused of locking up more than a million mainly Uygur Muslims in mass internment camps to prevent what it calls terrorist activities. According to information on its website, DeepGlint developed a joint lab with Urumqi police in April 2018.