A city in Xinjiang is being patrolled by unmanned police surveillance vehicles, a Russian city in the Arctic Circle is deploying a strong facial recognition network, and the state of Telangana in southern India is continuing to saturate itself with CCTV.
Autonomous police vehicles with facial recognition have been deployed in Xinjiang
According to Radio Free Asia (RFA), Shopping malls, tourist attractions, and residential areas in Karamay, a city in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, are being patrolled 24 hours a day by 20 unmanned electric police patrol cars.
As RFA broke off the connection, a local police officer explained to RFA that the vehicles are equipped with eight 360-degree-rotating cameras. A government website reported that the cars have facial recognition and monitoring capabilities.
In the city, self-driving patrols began with five vehicles in February. According to Chinese media, they are anticipated to be deployed throughout Xinjiang. The firm, Zhongke Tianji, has announced that it would create 3,000 smart automobiles.
According to American journalist and author Geoffrey Cain, who wrote The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future, he believes that the vehicles are being used in this instance more as a visual scare tactic, giving the impression that the government is always watching.
Facial recognition in Murmansk, a city on the Barents coast of Russia
The Barents Observer claims that 1,658 additional CCTV cameras will be installed in Murmansk, a city on a deep bay in the Barents Sea on Russia's northern coastline near the borders of Norway and Finland, as part of a face recognition-enabled Smart City project.
Murmansk, Russia's largest city north of the Arctic Circle, has already installed 1,400 CCTV cameras. By September 1, 600 additional cameras will be placed, according to the regional minister of digital development. There will be 1,658 new cameras deployed in 868 places by the end of 2022.
Using computer vision, a new video analytics management center will integrate the cameras' feeds, recognizing persons from databases. It'll be the other way around: the system will use face recognition to look up a specific individual in a database.
Reference: Biometric Update