A Chinese company claims to have developed facial recognition that can successfully ID faces that are partially obscured by masks – which most are these days to ward off the risk of contracting coronavirus.

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Hanwang Technology, which also goes by the English name Hanvon, began work on the technology in January shortly after the beginning of the viral outbreak, and rolled it out less than a month later.

“If connected to a temperature sensor, it can measure body temperature while identifying the person’s name, and then the system would process the result, say, if it detects a temperature over 38 degrees,” Hanwang Vice President Huang Lei told Reuters.

Hanwang’s CCS technology was born from the desire to care for every kid in the classroom, even the “often-ignored, average students,” he adds. Zhang shows me one of Hanwang’s CCS cameras. It’s the size of a mandarin orange, but it can recognize all 50 students in a classroom. A facial-recognition company in Beijing says it can identify you even if you’re wearing a mask. That’s according to Reuters, who spoke to the Vice President of Hanwang Technology Ltd recently.

The firm said that it used core technology developed over the past ten years, a sample database of approximately 6 million unmasked faces and a far smaller database of masked faces, to create the technology.

The new technology is included in “single channel” recognition products best deployed at the entrance of buildings, for example. It’s also in “multi-channel” products, which the company claims can be deployed by multiple surveillance cameras to scan crowds and identify faces within a second in crowds of up to 30 people.

Hanwang, the facial-recognition company that has placed 2 million of its cameras at entrance gates across the world, started preparing for the coronavirus in early January. Find 382+ IP Cameras security companies and products listed in the IFSEC Global Directory. Hanwang Technology Co., Ltd Website Email Us T: +86 755 8348 9801.

Huang told Reuters that when wearing a mask, the recognition rate can reach about 95 per cent; without he says it is 99.5 per cent.

The Ministry of Public Security, which runs the police, is a major customer of the company. It counts about 200 clients in Beijing using the technology and anticipates more more provinces to start installing it soon, Huang told Reuters.

He also predicts more foreign interest, as citizens across the world don face masks in the midst of the viral outbreak.

“It not only benefits Chinese people, but also, when the technology is applied globally, it can benefit the world,” he told Reuters.

Hanwang Technology is not the first to try to crack this. China’s SenseTime, the world’s most valuable AI startup, said in February that it was rolling out a facial-recognition product that combines thermal imaging cameras (to spot potential coronavirus carriers), with a mask algorithm, to detect those who are not wearing masks in public places.

It said that for building access control, its software can identify people even when they’re wearing masks with a “high accuracy”. “With these methods, management personnel are provided with a full range of epidemic prevention information such as body temperature, mask-wearing status, and employee identity,” the February 6 statement said.

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Photo：Sixth Tone

Editor's note: This is part one of a two-part series on face-scanning technology in Chinese classrooms. The second part will run next Sunday, April 7.

(Sixth Tone) — Jason Todd first discovered his school’s secret on the internet.

It was late September, less than a month after high school had started. Jason was idly scrolling through his news feed on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo when he saw a trending hashtag — #ThankGodIGraduatedAlready — and clicked it.

Under the hashtag, someone had posted a photo depicting a bird’s-eye view of a classroom. Around 30 students sat at their desks, facing the blackboard. Their backpacks lay discarded at their feet. It looked like a typical Chinese classroom.

Except for the colored rectangles superimposed on each student’s face. “ID: 000010, State 1: Focused,” read a line of text in a green rectangle around the face of a student looking directly at the blackboard. “ID: 000015, State 5: Distracted,” read the text in a red rectangle — this student had buried his head in his desk drawer. A blue rectangle hovered around a girl standing behind her desk. The text read: “ID: 00001, State 3: Answering Questions.”

Jason thought the photo was a scene from a sci-fi movie — until he noticed the blue school badges embroidered on the chest of the familiar white polos worn by the students. It was exactly the same as the one he was wearing.

“F**k, no,” he thought.

Photo: Sixth Tone

Jason is a 16-year-old student at Niulanshan First Secondary School in Beijing. He wears a pair of black-framed glasses and likes to read DC comics so much that he chose to use the name of one of his favorite characters for the sake of anonymity. If he hadn’t seen that image online, he wouldn’t have questioned the presence of the tiny white surveillance camera installed above his classroom’s blackboard. After all, Niulanshan never informed him — or any of its 3,300 other students — that facial recognition cameras were capturing their every move in class. In fact, it’s unlikely that the combined 28,000 students in the six other schools testing the same system know they are part of China’s grand artificial intelligence (AI) experiment.

In July 2017, China’s highest governmental body, the State Council, released an ambitious policy initiative called the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (NGAIDP).

The 20,000-word blueprint outlines China’s strategy to become the leading AI power in both research and deployment by 2030 by building a domestic AI industry worth nearly $150 billion. It advocates incorporating AI in virtually all aspects of life, including medicine, law, transportation, environmental protection, and what it calls “intelligent education.”

Following the NGAIDP’s release, Chinese tech companies have rushed to secure government support and investor funding for various AI projects, several of which are being tested in Chinese schools. Over the past two months, I interviewed a dozen students in schools that have installed different “intelligent education” systems and spoke to tech entrepreneurs whose companies are developing the systems used in those schools.

While advocates claim that using facial recognition to monitor students’ in-class behavior can accurately assess attention levels and help them learn more efficiently, most students I spoke with had a different opinion. They showed concern that the school never asked for their consent before harvesting their facial data. One student expressed anxiety at the idea that the times he was caught slacking off in class would eventually be used to determine his chances of attending his dream university. Other students disconnected the cameras at their school before final exams in protest.

In addition, teachers and experts question the extent to which facial recognition systems can improve student performance. Experts say there are many technological, legal, and moral barriers to overcome before facial recognition can be widely deployed in Chinese education. But the government’s AI push is already introducing this technology before settling such debates, leading experts to agree that regulations on the technology urgently need to catch up.

The ‘Class Care System’

In the upper left corner of the photo Jason found on Weibo, you can just make out the words “CCS Class Care System.” CCS is one of the flagship products of Hanwang Education, a subsidiary of Hanwang Technology Co. Ltd. Hanwang is a household name for China’s

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