Chinese Company Ushers in New Era of Smart Surveillance
Let us just be true to ourselves and agree that China has always been light years ahead of us. At a time when we still rely on guards and security services to secure locations or buildings, the Chinese have already turned to Artificial Intelligence to do the work for them. And man it is doing pretty good!
Watrix, a Chinese surveillance company has developed a new system for “gait recommendation”. In other words, the program would be able to identify people up to 165 feet away, and that too based on just the way they walk. So if someone, say wears a mask or walks in an awkward angle, the software would be prompted to use existing footage to detect them.
New Breakthrough Technology
This software cannot be fooled, too! The software analyzes a person’s entire body, and so any out of the ordinary stance would not click with this software. Watrix, claims that this software has a 94 percent accuracy rate, and that is pretty good for a software. But there is a catch in that. The analysis is not done live but is done in real-time.
Another thing that potential users need to know is that these claims have not been verified independently, and the effectiveness of this software remains to be largely unknown. But that has not stopped the government to start using this feature. Police in Beijing and Shangai have already started using this technology. This is a part of a push that is being undertaken by the government to develop data-driven AI surveillance throughout the country.
New Era of Surveillance
And for a country like China with a population of that size, that is important. For example. Xinjiang, a province that is inhabited with a majority of Muslims have already expressed interest in using this technology as it helps them to feel much safer.
But gait recognition is no new technology as various other countries have already had their necks into this research. The UK and U.S Defense Information Systems Agency have spent years researching this project but was not yet commercialized. At least we can say for sure that Watrix has helped to commercialize this technology. Though there have been some tall claims made about this technology, one can know for sure only when this feature is put to the test and is rolled out across China, and eventually the World.
