South Korea is planning to add facial recognition to the technology arsenal of its contact-tracing initiative, with the hope of saving numerous hours of labor and speed up notifications of potential exposure to COVID-19, according to Thomson Reuters.
Bucheon, a city of more than 800,000 at the edge of Seoul, has been granted Won 1.6 billion (US$1.35 million) from the country’s Ministry of Science and ICT, and contributed an additional Won 500 million ($ million) of its budget to develop the facial recognition system for tracking the movements and contact of infected people on footage from 10,820 CCTV cameras. The system can reportedly track the paths of up to ten people in between five and ten minutes.