Chinese Government Sponsors Facial Recognition Technology to Detect Uyghurs
The Chinese Patent Office (CPO) published patent applications of newly developed technologies to detect Uyghurs. The research and the patent applications are sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
The CPO published a patent application (with application number CN201711408669, filed with the CPO on Dec. 22, 2017) titled “A kind of new HOG features Uyghur nationality facial image recognizer” (HOG is the abbreviation for a technical term, histogram of oriented gradients).
The patent application disclosed that “facial recognition … has wide applications in the field of social security,” “Uyghurs have different facial appearance from Han Chinese,” and “An Uyghurs face database has been built upon typical face images of Uyghurs of different sexes and ages collected from all areas of Xinjiang Autonomous Region,” in the published specification of the application. The application described a newly developed method to more accurately distinguish Uyghurs from Han Chinese based on facial images.