Real ID launches digital ID app tailored to Asia with SenseTime facial recognition

The development of technologies for safeguarding digital identities is Asia has lagged behind the progress made in the U.S. and Europe, due to the region’s diverse mix of languages and the challenges of delivering accurate facial recognition for different races, according to Real ID CEO Chong Han Ping. To address this market and enable individuals to control and protect their data, Real ID has launched a screening and face-learning technology for identity verification.

Real ID uses facial recognition and liveness detection technology from partner SenseTime, along with AI and blockchain technology to shorten onboarding and know your client (KYC) processes for remittance transactions by up to 90 percent, while significantly reducing error, according to Chong. The app provides a combination of on- and off-chain transactions to allow verification results to be audited without revealing underlying identity information, and leverages optical character recognition and cross-racial facial recognition accuracy.

“Multi-language verification is rare, and we have focused our efforts on building partnerships in different markets to improve our language-learning and OCR technology as well as to shorten machine-reading time,” Chong says.

Real ID’s roots in China include former data scientists and machine-learning experts from Tencent, China National Research Center, and Nanyang Technological University, and the company is in talks with government authorities in India, the Philippines, and Indonesia to create a frictionless digital ID ecosystem for cross-border business.

China has ambitions to become the global leader in AI technology, but SenseTime CEO Xu Li said recently that technical standards are needed to support industry growth.

Article Topics

Asia  |  digital identity  |  facial recognition  |  mobile app  |  Real ID  |  SenseTime