Chinese police officers now have high-tech “smart specs” that ID criminals

After installing the world’s largest state-owned surveillance system (100m+ CCTV cameras), China is now equipping its police officers with suspect-identifying “smart glasses.”

It’s the latest advancement in China’s big push to integrate facial recognition tech into the daily life of its citizens.

Big brother rocks shades

The technology in the glasses can recognize suspects from snapshots of a crowd, and can pick out faces from any angle. Once captured, images are run through a database of 10,000 suspects — and a match can be determined in just 100 milliseconds.

As reported by a state-owned Chinese media company, these smart shades have already helped with the arrest of 7 suspects in an ongoing case.

Facial recognition: Big in China

Chinese citizens can use their “faceprint” to do everything from enter college dorms to board airplanes.

Certain applications of this tech have been called into question. In Muslim-dominated villages, for instance, the government is experimenting with facial-recognition systems that can detect when a person of interest wanders more than 1k feet from designated “safe areas.”

The country is working hard to develop the technology to match someone’s face with their ID with 90% accuracy. That 10% margin for error seems a little high for criminal ID, though — especially considering China’s severe penal code.