Last year, an AI technology called FindFace garnered a lot of attention after it was found to trace the faces of pedestrians back to their online social accounts. Now, one year on, Baidu’s own facial recognition technology has miraculously been able to reunite a Chinese family after 27 years apart.
The emotional reunion was conducted via video
Fu Gui, 33, uploaded a photograph of his 10-year-old self to China’s local database for missing children (Baobeihuijia) back in 2009 after recalling early memories of his youth with a family he no longer knew. The search turned up no leads for 8 years until recently when the picture of a four-year-old boy from Chongqing was submitted to the database in early 2017.
It took only weeks before Baidu’s cross-age facial recognition AI went to work and identified a list of potential matches from a database of thousands. The advanced AI was successful in comparing individual parts of the face which allowed it to account for the child’s morphing facial features such as eyes, nose, and mouth. This proved useful in Fu Gui’s case because the two photos were taken of him as a young child and much later as a pre-adolescent boy.
Baidu's facial recognition AI looks for key features that may have changed in a child
A DNA test later confirmed Fu Gui to be the four-year-old from Chongqing who went missing in 1990, one of 70,000 children in China who was abducted by traffickers at a young age and forced to start a new life elsewhere after being sold off.
Fu Gui’s story is a touching subject and also another example of how image identification tools have become smarter as more and more photos are naturally studied by the algorithm. In this case, Baidu’s facial recognition technology improved significantly after being tested with company’s search engine for images, which has allowed the AI to sample over 200 million photos and refine positive matches to above 99% accuracy.
Fu Gui's biological family in Chongqing
. digitalrev.com2017-4-18 03:00