猪脸识别：“二师兄”也要刷脸了 | Facial recognition technology deployed on pigs

Chinese company Yingzi Holdings announced it had started using facial recognition technology to scan pigs faces during a press conference last week.

During the press conference, a live connection showed how an employee collected a pig’s facial information by scanning its face and successfully identified the pig, with all of the pig's information revealed on the screen.

Founder of Yingzi Holdings Chen Yaosheng speaks on the press conference. /Xinhua News Photo

Chen Yaosheng, founder of Yingzi Holdings said that 168,821 pigs from 1,692 pig farms across the country had been scanned using facial recognition as of March 21. 

According to Chen, the technology can be used in various parts of the pig breeding industry, including feeding, management and animal health checks.  

However, difficulties still exist in the process of facial recognition process for pigs. “Humans would stay still in front of the camera, but pigs don’t,” Chen said. “Pigs are less obedient to the order, and they usually lie down or close their eyes, so it is much more difficult to identify its face.”

What’s more, as pigs give birth to multiple babies, many pigs share the similar facial characteristics, which further increases the difficulties of identifying each pig, wrote the Guangzhou Daily.

An employee showed how to scan and identify the pig using the facial recognition technology. /Xinhua News Photo 

Last week, teams who mastered the technology entered a seed and breeding industry town in Guangzhou, China’s Guangdong Province to deploy the technology on pigs, reported Guangzhou Daily. The research results are expected to be widely used in the breeding industry and food security field, wrote the Guangzhou Daily. 

In fact, Yingzi is not the first Chinese company that has deployed artificial Intelligence to the pig breeding industry.

China’s largest e-commerce company Alibaba agreed to offer facial recognition software to a Chinese food-and-agriculture conglomerate Tequ to better manage their pig farms in February.