International. Engineers from China's Alibaba Group have trained an "eye recognition" algorithm along with a mask detection model to perform biometric identification of people wearing respiratory masks, in a process the company has detailed in a blog post.
When government officials implemented control measures dubbed "Ten Stric" in the Yuhang district of Hangzhou City on Feb. 3, to prevent the spread of COVID-19, officials were faced with the challenge of how to control and enforce a limitation on people leaving their homes to buy necessities. With most check-ins and check-outs kept manually, errors and omissions can render measures ineffective. However, an automatic access management record with facial recognition should identify people who wear masks.
Alibaba Cloud's smart database vector team developed the technology and provided it for free to certain organizations.
During the feature extraction part of the registration process, two different sets of features are captured; one for the full face and one for the area around the eyes and forehead. By testing the Named Faces in Nature (LFW) dataset, the company's AnalyticDB eye recognition algorithm obtained an accuracy of 99.18 percent. It also scored 93.4 percent against the cfp_fp dataset, and 94.2 percent that matches the aging dataset. Mask detection is done before facial recognition, so that the right feature set can match.
The system performs vector searches, which is compatible with AnalyticDB for MySQL and AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL. The company says that in real-world applications, AnalyticDB can respond to queries from billions of vector data inputs in 100 milliseconds. It is used in security projects in multiple cities. Alibaba provided facial recognition for Shanghai's smart city system.
Facial recognition and eye recognition, and mask detection models, as well as the community resident management solution, have been open source by Alibaba, and the company has provided the AnalyticDB database engine and systems for free to organizations running access management applications in support of pandemic containment.
Source: Alibaba Cloud.
