Megvii, a leading face recognition specialist in China filed papers to listing itself on Hong Kong’s stock exchange. It is popular and known as China’s one of the best artificial intelligence companies. Its face checking technology is far accurate than its competitor systems from IBM and Amazon, according to a western study. Now campaigners are concerning its use for surveillance. According to the recent reports, White House is planning to enlist Megvii to trade blacklist to stop its making use of components and software from the US origin.
Face maps
- Consumer-focused hardware uses Face + + such as-
- Xiaomi, Vivo, and Huawei smartphones
- Lenovo laptops
- Drivers’ identity checking software Didi Chuxing (these apps are known as a ride-hailing app so that passengers can easily check the driver’s identity and have a safe ride)
- Alibaba’s “smile-to-pay” option which was tested within KFC restaurant
- Jiayuan, a Chinese dating website (based on user’s preference, this site automatically finds a match for the user)
Megivii said that its major revenue is coming from the smart city applications and it includes security management for educational institutes, workplaces, and even major events. According to the recent reports, Beijing based firm’s tech is getting used to help in thousands of arrests in china and police departments of other countries are also adopting this technology.
How does it work?
It starts to work by detecting a face in an image. After that, it crafts a pattern by detecting eye, chin, lip along with other thousand key features. It checks that the pattern matches the device owner’s or not. And it can also cross-check it against its huge database. Its database basically carrying unlimited people’s face provided by their clients. Along with face recognition, Megvii claims that its technology can easily detect emotions, eye-gaze, beauty score, the health of the skin and even the body gesture.
Now Megvii is planning to offer 33D depth facial recognition and to perform this task it has tied up with an Australian company, AMS. Its stock sale will fund further research.
Toppled place
Reuter’s agency has shared that Megvii is planning to raise between $500m to $1bn but the company itself has not revealed the exact amount it wants to raise. The Chinese language prospectus has shared a long list which contains possible risk factors, such as further tariff between US-China or ‘trade war’, the US can include ‘severe restrictions’ on the business ways (Huawei has already faced), and uncertainty of the Chinese legal system can make the entire thing hard to be in China’s rules compliance.
It can get damaged by rumors that its AI technology is doing abuses Megvii has already realized that its face recognition technology is facing rising controversy. Previously in 2019, Face ++ is there to limit Uighur Muslims in China, Human Rights Watch claimed and said they have evidence. And even in Hong Kong city, protestors demanded to remove it in fear of carrying out facial ID checking.
