HANOI, VIETNAM - Media OutReach - 20 April 2020 - On April 20, 2020, VinAI Research, a Vingroup-funded research laboratory, announced its results of a successful study on facial recognition technology that can identify people wearing face protective masks with stable accuracy. VinAI Research has become one of the first units in the world to successfully study this technology. VinAI is willing to provide the recognition technology to the community for free to contribute to the prevention of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

VinAI's system uses a new and unique deep learning model developed by experts of the Institute for research and application of optimisation (VinOptima), to study a method with stable accuracy to identify people who may have their faces covered.

This deep learning model designed to reproduce activities of neural networks in the human brain, allows training and automatically extracting valuable information of part of the face to address the recognition problem when people use masks.

The study shows that The VinAI's system has significantly better accuracy than the current technology when identify people wearing face masks. Advantage of VinAI's recognition technology is a different algorithm and application of identification technology.

VinAI's recognition system only uses information from normal camera sensors while other recognition technologies use infrared and depth sensors. Therefore, the cost of VinAI's products will not be high and can be easily integrated into existing camera systems. The products will be widely applied into the employee time tracking and authentication systems of businesses.

"Masks are essential item in the COVID-19 prevention rules, but when users wear masks, the accuracy of current facial recognition technology can be reduced by more than 50 per cent. Therefore, VinAI has urgently developed this technology to promptly meet social needs." - Dr. Bui Hai Hung (Director of VinAI Research) said.

VinAI has also found a solution to automatically monitor users wearing masks on cameras. This solution can actively support the management of spacing among people in organisations and companies when they return to work after the pandemic.

VinAI Research is cooperating with VinSmart electronic equipment manufacturing company to install the new technology on Vsmart phones, allowing users conveniently unlock phone by facial recognition.

The applications on Vsmart also makes VinAI become one of the first units in the world to apply identification technology without removing face masks on commercial products.

Besides the commercialisation, VinAI is ready to provide this latest technology to partners for the purpose of serving public health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The achievement not only has practical significance on a global scale, but also affirms Vingroup's transformation into a leading technology corporation in Vietnam which has step-by-step adapted to advanced global and complex technologies.

References:

VinAI Research was established on April 17, 2019. In just one year, the institute has made two AI technology researches that were announced at the world's leading conference on AI in Canada, that made Vietnam only the second country in the region to have projects published at this conference.

The world's recognition technologies: The system of facial recognition is an app that can identify people from their photos or videos like FaceID from Apple, DeepFace from Facebook, Rekognition from Amazon. These technologies currently do not solve the problem of identifying people in masks.