Chinese scientists have developed a 500 megapixel facial recognition camera, that it claims has four times more acuity than the human eye. It has been designed to work with surveillance systems, allowing them to pick out faces from a crowd - which it can then identifying using AI software. Dubbed the Super Camera, the CCTV camera has been developed by Fudan University and Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and was shown at International Industry Fair.
The new camera is likely to be used with China's controversial Social Credit system, which restricts and rewards citizens using a ranking system - which is then monitored using the country's increasing use of facial recognition surveillance systems.
"The challenge for a camera of this scope, especially in a cloud-led AI environment is the quantity of data that's needed to shuffle around for identification; as you raise the detail level of each image as the Fudan University scientists have done, you seriously raise the size of the files — especially for video — a substantial amount," says Australian freelance technology journalist Alex Kidman in an ABC report
"The serious technical challenge — leaving privacy concerns aside for a second — is in uploading that data and parsing it in a sensible timeframe for the kinds of applications they're talking about, especially wirelessly."
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