Chinese search engine giant Baidu is launching a major face recognition trial at the Wuzhen tourist area in Shanghai.The technology will be used to thwart scalpers at the tourist town and speed up the wait at any place where checking tickets or IDs leads to long lines, reports the New Scientist.The system, which is expected to process 5000 visitors a day, will be implemented at various shops, hotels and attractions in the area.When people check in to hotels in the tourist area, they will now have their pictures taken and uploaded to a central database. If they leave and re-enter the town, the face-recognition software will check that they are actually a guest of a hotel there before allowing them back in.Previously, multiple types of entry ticket had to be handed out to distinguish between one-off visitors and those staying for longer. But the system could easily be exploited, and some guests were caught sharing their tickets with other people to avoid paying the entry fee.To prevent this, the town started to use fingerprint identification for hotel guests, so only one individual could use each entry pass. “But this took too long,” says Yuanqing Lin, director of the Institute of Deep Learning at Baidu.
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