As almost every Chinese has been wearing a face mask amidst the outbreak of the coronavirus, Beijing has been actively working on enhancing its capability to monitor people’s faces.
Hanwang Technology Co, a high-tech intelligent pattern recognition company headquartered in Beijing, announced that it has developed a new facial recognition technology to use against people who are behind face masks. The company started the project in January and finished it in about a month.
Hanwang claimed a 95 percent accuracy against people wearing face masks and 99.5 percent accuracy against people without face masks.
Hanwang offers two products based on this technology. One is a single channel product that can be used at the entrance of an office building. The other is a multi-channel recognition system that can be connected with multiple monitoring cameras; it can identify each face instantly from a group of over 30 people.
The primary customer for these products is the Ministry of Public Security.
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Excerpt in Chinese:
在这次新冠病毒疫情中，中国几乎所有人都戴上口罩，防范感染。这给监控工作提出了新的难题。汉王科技公司宣布，已经开发出一种新的技术，可以对戴口罩的人进行人脸识别。
这个研发项目是在1月份启动，大约用了一个月的时间完成。
该公司开发出了两款产品，一款是单频道，可用于办公楼的入口处。另一款是功能更为强大的多频道识别系统，可使用多个监控摄像头。黄磊说，多频道识别器可以在瞬间把一群30多人中的每张人脸识别出来。
路透社引用他的话说，“人们带口罩时的识别准确度为95%左右，能够确保大多数人脸都能被识别出来”。如果不戴口罩，黄磊说，识别的准确度可达99.5%。
据黄磊介绍，汉王科技的这项技术的最大客户是中国公安部。它可以利用这项技术把人脸跟人名数据库进行匹配，从而跟踪人们的行踪，追查犯罪嫌疑人和恐怖分子。
Source: VOA, March 9, 2020
https://www.voachinese.com/a/China-Facial-Recognizes-Mask-Wearers20200319/5321039.html