Grappling with other competitors in facial recognition, the Chinese AI unicorn SenseTime makes a breakthrough on its new product called SensePass Pro. Let's take a look.
SenseTime further improves the facial recognition technology by rolling out a new device “SensePass Pro” on October 6, which shortens the operation time to 0.3 seconds for every shoot.
The product is designed for various scenarios based on the identification function, including recording attendance of employees, access for entrances, detecting the VIPs for stores and identifying visitors.
Differ from contenders, SensePass Pro is capable to raise the access efficiency by identifying three people simultaneously with a high recognition precision of 99.99%, which supports people from different regions worldwide and can’t be affected by age, dress (like hats and glasses), beard, heavy make-up, as well as strong light or backlight, according to the company.
In addition, the five-year-old company emphasized more on the appearance design, adopting metal materials as Apple does. The supreme experience of products matters a lot among all the competitors today.
Smart surveillance cameras for public security use were once the most popular application scenario for facial recognition technology, in terms of the ability of monetization. However, the market tends to be saturated after fierce competition. Then, “smart entrance” comes out and led the next wave from the beginning of 2018. Today, almost every computer vision company is seeking a toehold in it, according to Liu Xin, the Chief Operation Officer of the computer vision startup SeetaTech.
Apart from security and entrance scenarios, financial institutes are the next target for SenseTime. The company offers its facial recognition tech products to JD.com, UnionPay, China Merchants Bank, Lakala, Rong360 and so on.
Currently, SenseTime is grappling with another two AI unicorn companies: Megvii and CloudWalk, which also make efforts to cooperate with banks and internet financial platforms.
Megvii, an Alibaba-backed AI leading startup, provides facial recognition service platform FaceID to the clients, such as China Citic Bank, Bank of Jiangsu, Bank of Beijing, as well as online financial services providers such as Alipay and the financial platform of Mi.com.
CloudWalk, the top one facial recognition product supplier for banks in China, collaborates with over 50 banks including Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Bank of China, Bank of Communications, and so forth. CloudWalk gains more trust from banks because the company was born from the state-owned institute “Chinese Academy of Sciences”.
SenseTime was founded by Tang Xiao’ou and Xu Li, two deep learning scientists from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The company operates in dozens of cities, and Hong Kong is an important one. “SenseTime will be benefited not only from the massive market and resources in mainland China but also from the cutting-edge science breakthroughs in Hong Kong,” said Tang Xiao’ou, “we’re exploring to employ our technology to more aspects of human life.”