Chinese tourist town is using facial recognition to allow visitors to enter: System is better than a human at identifying people

The days of having to remember to your ID with you could soon be a thing of the past. The famous tourist town of Wuzhen, China, is now using face recognition technology to act as its entry pass through the gates of the attraction. The system uses cameras to spot people as they approach the entry, and checks these against a database of registered visitors within a few seconds. The facial recognition technology is thought to be up to 99.77 per cent accurate and able to distinguish people better than a human. Chinese web firm Baidu's system is based on neural networks, which can process huge amounts of data – more than one billion faces – with 99.8 per cent accuracy.