China’s government departments have cooperated with tech enterprises to apply cross-age face recognition technology to search for missing persons, helping abducted children get back to their parents. 

In April and May, the police found five abducted children in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province in South China. One of them was abducted 19 years ago, the Beijing News reported on September 9.

In 2000, a boy was kidnapped in Shenzhen and the kidnapper demanded a ransom of 200,000 yuan ($28,250). 

The police have been looking for the child for many years, and worked out portraits of the missing child by simulating changes in his appearance over the years. 

The boy was reunited with his parents on June 19, after 19 years. He is now working as a chef at a restaurant in Shenzhen. 

ACROSS AGES

You may know certain things about facial recognition since this technology has been applied in many fields including surveillance, payment, and entertainment. 

The tech across age groups is believed to be able to help police officers narrow down searches. 

With the support of Tencent’s massive data stores, Tencent YouTu Lab (优图) has created a cross-age face recognition software that is aimed at solving child abduction cases. 

The lab created a learning strategy to make cross-age face recognition more reliable and accurate to fully master the facial age-changing tech from the data. 

 

Now the accuracy has reached nearly 99.8%. 

As of May 15, the system named TuanYuan, or “Reunion”, has posted information on 3,978 missing children, with 3,901 of them found, a success rate of 98%, according to Xinhua, citing data from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). 

BROADER APPLICATION

At the end of 2017, the police department in Sichuan Province proposed testing the technological combination of artificial intelligence and cross-age facial recognition in missing children cases in the province. 

In 2018, the Ministry of Civil Affairs developed a network to look for missing relatives using facial recognition functions. Once a photo is uploaded, the search system can run through 2,000 stations’ databases. 

As the Beijing News reported, news aggregator Toutiao rolled out the new facial recognition function to find missing people on the platform.

 

Users can upload a missing person’s photo and the platform can match it with missing people in the database. 

In 2019, the cross-age facial recognition technology identified 7 out of 10 missing children. Shenzhen Police have used the tech to recover five abducted children since April. 

Chen Jianfeng, director of the criminal investigation bureau under the MPS, believes that cross-age face recognition narrows the search scope from hundreds of thousands down to the hundreds, which greatly cuts down investigation workloads. 

However, AI is just a tool used to identify missing children. DNA comparisons are needed for final confirmation. 

 

Share to let your friends know!

SOURCE | Global Times

👇These Articles May Help You

	You’ll Be Blacklisted for These Transactions! Strict Rule!
	RMB With These Numbers Are All Fake! Pay Attention!
	How Much Money Can I Bring When Entering China?