The Silicon Review ^Asia

The Chinese police are arming up in style with tech-savvy gadgets. According to reports from local media, Railway police in Zhengzhou, a central Chinese city, is the first in the country to use facial-recognition eyewear to screen passengers during the Lunar New Year travel rush.

This is a period of extremely busy holiday travel, often described as the largest human migration event on Earth, and cops revealed that technology has already been used to capture seven suspects wanted in criminal cases, as well as 26 individuals traveling under fake identities.

The glasses which look like Google glasses are connected to tablets, which are linked to a database that can match travelers with criminal suspects. Since these portable devices, it gives an edge to the police to act swiftly.

Beijing-based LLVision, which developed the glasses, told the Wall Street Journal that the device during testing, the system could identify faces from a database of 10,000 in 100 milliseconds

A basic, video-only version of the glasses retails for around $630 and has been sold to countries including the US and Japan, according to the company.

China has been boosting up its use of facial-recognition technology as it moves toward a nationwide database that can recognize any citizen within three seconds. Now the police have been armed with a new method of surveillance.

William Nee, the China researcher at Amnesty International, told WSJ: “The potential to give individual police officers facial-recognition technology in sunglasses could eventually make China’s surveillance state all the more ubiquitous.”