An independently developed biometric face recognition system has received approval and will be used for public identification in China; its leading inventor was quoted as saying by Monday's China Daily.

The invention, developed by Su Guangda, an Electronic Engineering Department professor with Beijing-based Tsinghua University, has been approved by a panel of experts from the Ministry of Public Security, said the newspaper.

Excelling at capturing moving facial images and featuring a multi-camera technology to lower the error for mismatching, the system will be used in public places, such as airports, post offices, customs entrances and even residential communities, in the near future.

The system extracts the human face from the surroundings and measures nodal points, such as the distance between the eyes, the shape of the cheekbones and other distinguishing features and then compares them to the nodal points computed from a database of pictures in order to find a match.

"It has a superior advantage compared with fingerprint identification because the country doesn't have a fingerprint database for the general public," said Su. 

(Source: Xinhua)