Paying with your face

Rongjia Hu & Ke Zhao

A:Guys, time for boarding, hurry up!

B:Terrible,terrible, I can not find my boaring pass

A: Just show your electronic boading pass, you don’t need the paper one

B: OMG, where is my mobile phone? Did I leave it some where?

Have you ever experienced the same situation in your life? You may not find your passport for check-in, you may not find your ticket to enter a museum, you may worry about losing your train ticket…...It happens quite often for people who leave in a rapid pace of living environment, and it is even worse for the careless people, in fact, it’s suffering for them. Anyway, just imagine that in the future, you do not need to worry all those stuffs happening to you as long as you keep your face? what a good news! Because the technology from Face ++ will remove your annoyance, it is definitely your gospel.

Face++ is a facial recognition system can be applied in varied industry fields, for example, the accurate face recognition can be used in financial transaction. What’s more, now Baidu, the most widely used Chinese search engine is developing a system to let people get the train tickets by showing their faces. The company have worked with the government WUZHEN, a highly popular historic tourist attraction in China, to provide access to many tourists for its attractions without ticket. Therefore, to a large extent, the face recognition improves tourists’  visiting experience. We have to say that sometimes it is really annoyed to hold a entry ticket all the time as some scenic area is huge with different sections and you must show your ticket each time, but now you can just “take your face” with you.

We may not fully understand to what extent that the artificial intelligence(AI) has developed and how many things that can help human-beings, but we can not ignore its definite advantages. From the perspective of tourism industry and payment in financial sector, which can benefit a lot from the AI, specifically  for the facial recognition. As globalization moves faster, there are increasing number of people are becoming nomads especially the businessman. They travel a lot to different corners all over the world, but sometimes they are restricted to consume because of the limited payment, but a Face ++ can solve this problem and facilitate more consumption. Turn on the camera and lock on the buyer’s face, done! A super simple procedure, no more credit card, no more password.

However, every coin has two sides, we also need to talk about the weaknesses of facial recognition technology. Firstly, it is very difficult to collect all the identity photos from all citizens in a country. The technology initially sets off in China is because of the nation’s attitudes toward surveillance and privacy,  moreover, the Chinese government has a large centralized database of ID photos. The collecting system of ID photos would be totally different in another country. Secondly, as time goes by or for some special situation, people’s face is changing somehow, which could be a technical challenge in terms of the accuracy.

In brief, we deserve the benefits of AI, but also need to consider the hardships we may face. No more long queue when we go to WUZHEN scenic area is a very exciting thing, since long queue is a annoying thing for a country with the population of closely 1.4 billion. Nevertheless, like I mentioned above, there are always some problems in front of you when you start to do something new, but once we find the problem then we may solve it eventually.

Article: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603494/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-paying-with-your-face/