The police department in Chongqing, a sprawling metropolis of more than 30m people in south-west China, had long struggled to make use of its many CCTV cameras, catching just a handful of suspects a year using human efforts.
But when it deployed the facial recognition software produced by SenseTime, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence start-ups, it was able to nab 69 suspects in just one month, according to the company.
“It’s impossible for people to monitor all the cameras in China,” says Xu Li, the chief executive and co-founder of SenseTime. “But by turning the original video into structured data, it makes it much easier to store and search so you can find, for example, a woman in a white T-shirt with a blue bag with a BMW next to her.”