Hong Kong police will roll out artificial intelligence facial recognition across the force's Smart View closed-circuit television network within this month, aiming to accelerate criminal investigations and locate vulnerable missing persons, particularly elderly residents suffering from dementia.
Introducing facial recognition algorithms directly into the Smart View infrastructure will automate analysis, functioning as around-the-clock investigative support to identify suspects and locate missing individuals while freeing frontline officers for field duties.
Retrospective searches and real-time alerts define operational deployment The facial recognition module will operate under two distinct modes depending on investigative needs.
Operations Bureau Superintendent Raymond Cheng noted that because continuous facial recognition analysis requires heavy computational resources, the feature will not run simultaneously across every lens on the network.
To defend against cybersecurity risks and external hacking, the force operates Smart View on a dedicated private optical fiber network, while mandatory firewall barriers isolate all external and commercial camera feeds before data enters police servers.