China Can Now Identify Its Citizen By How They Walk

Police in Beijing and Shanghai is now using a system that can identify people by how they work that was developed by Watrix. This allows them to know who is who even when their faces aren’t visible.

If we go off the authors claims, the system has a 94% accuracy and a range of 50 meters. Plus it doesn’t even need special tools. It only needs the recordings from existing devices. At this moment, the system doesn’t allow real-time recognition. Analyzing on an hour of video requires about ten minutes of work during which the silhouette of a person is extracted and his walking style is generated.

On small scales, this could potentially be helpful. For example, a company could have a database of how their employees walk and than use it to detect who came late to work or to detect if any unauthorized personnel in places where they shouldn’t be.

On the other hand, it is hard to imagine China using this on a national scale. The technologies that China is already using are much more easily implemented and can work in real time. And for example, in case of facial recognition China already has a database of most of its citizens. Thus a questions remains, does this system even make sense.

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