Baidu’s Cross-age Facial Recognition AI Solves 27-year-old Abduction Case

A lot of people remain hesitant of trusting artificial intelligence solutions. However, two parents located in China have embraced this solution after the AI successfully returned their missing son to them. Fu Gui was abducted 27 years ago, and he has now been reunited with his birth parents thanks to Baidu’s artificial intelligence. A positive story that shows just how powerful this technology can be.

Baidu AI Solves Major Abduction Case

It has to be said, stories like these do not come around all that often. It is always sad to hear someone was abducted and never really got to know their birth parents due to external factors. For Fu Gui, most of his childhood and adult life has been spent wondering why he had very few recollections of what he used to be like when he was a kid.

Twenty-seven years later, the mystery is finally solved. Fu Gui’s parents found an unlikely ally in Baidu’s artificial intelligence solution. Gui uploaded a picture of himself when he was ten years old onto the Baobeihuijia website,  where people share their pictures in the hopes of finding lost family members. Interestingly enough, his real parents uploaded similar pictures just months after.

This particular online platform is designed to reunite families destroyed by abductions. Unlike what most people may think, child abduction is a very real problem in China, and it looks like things are only getting worse. Baobeihuijia uses volunteers who compare uploaded images to hopefully find connections and bring relatives closer together. This is a very painstaking task that has yielded positive results in the past, even though there are never enough people on hand to do everything in a timely manner.

This is why the platform was offered to make use of Baidu’s artificial intelligence solution. This transition occurred in March of 2017, and almost immediately yielded some unexpected results. The company’s AI specializes in cross-age facial recognition technology, which has been undergoing some thorough testing dating back to November of 2016.

Ever since Baidu’s AI has been deployed on this Chinese website, several matches have been identified already. All of this validates the technology and shows there is a dire need for such revolutionary technologies at this time. Although Gui’s parents also had his DNA tested, it was later confirmed he is indeed their long-lost son. It is quite a significant feat for Baidu and their AI solution to achieve such a success at this early stage of development.

Even though this is a major validation of the cross-age facial recognition tool, Baidu acknowledges the project is far from perfect. So far, it is only capable of matching photos taken six years apart, which is still a  bit of a drawback. However, the company is confident their solution achieves a 99.77% accuracy rate, which is far higher compared to humans. An intriguing development, to say the least

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