Police officers in large Russian cities will be able to identify criminals using face recognition glasses by 2020, the head of state-owned industrial conglomerate Rostec said Thursday.
The augmented-reality (AR) glasses will use technology that helped catch more than 180 criminals during the football World Cup in Russia last year, Sergei Chemezov said at a tech conference in central Russia. Their developer already deploys facial recognition technology to identify criminal suspects across a network of 160,000 surveillance cameras in Moscow.
“I think next year you’ll be able to see police with these unusual gadgets on the streets of major cities,” Chemezov was quoted as saying by the state-run TASS news agency Thursday.
FindFace technology developed by Rostec-owned firm NTechLab has made headlines in recent years for outing anti-corruption demonstrators in Russia and finding people’s social media accounts based on their photographs.
Chemezov’s announcement comes after Russian media reported that law enforcement officers in Moscow were testing bodycams with Rostec’s face recognition technology.
