The invention, developed by Su Guangda, an Electronic Engineering Department professor with Beijing-based Tsinghua University, has been approved by a panel of experts from the Ministry of Public Security.

The system excels at capturing moving facial images and features a multi-camera technology to lower the chances for mismatching, based on a database of 2.56 million human faces.

After a one-year trial operation, the system will be used in public places, such as airports, post offices, customs entrances and even residential communities, in the near future.

Facial recognition systems, which have been subject to increasing discussion in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, are computer-based security systems that are able to automatically detect and identify human faces.

The system extracts the human face from the surroundings and measures nodal points, such as the distance between the eyes, the shape of the cheekbones and other distinguishing features. It thencompares them to the nodal points computed from the database, which is able to scan 2.56 million images in a second, in order to find a match.

Currently, some countries have placed recognition cameras in public places to look for criminal suspects and missing children.

In China the technology is limited to police use, and it helped the police in Beijing discover a few criminal cases involving child abduction and supermarket blackmail in the past few years. Enditem