North Korea, Which Cannot Access GitHub, Has Also Developed Facial Recognition Technology

Recently, the North Korean media "Echoes of Unity" published an article introducing the newly developed self-developed intelligentBlue Sky Mobile Phone. The article said that the phone has a fast processing speed and supports features such as face recognition and fingerprint unlocking. According to earlier reports by North Korean media, the face recognition function of the smartphone was developed by Kim Il Sung University, a top institution in North Korea. So what is the level of this technology? In addition, what is the situation of AI development in North Korea?

North Korea, which is controversial in society due to its military, policies and cultural environment, has recently made headlines because of its technological advances.

Because of North Korea's internet restrictions, people rarely feel the connection between North Korea and computer science. When talking about this country, most people will think of some fixed labels, but usually not related to technology.

Indeed, to this day, North Korea's Internet services for individuals and commercial organizations are provided by the free domestic dedicated network of Kwangmyeong (Korean: 광명망), and only a very small number of government officials and foreign tourists can access the international network.

The outside world is also almost unaware of the actual status of Guangming.com. In 2016, due to a misconfiguration of the North Korean network, an engineer discovered that Guangming.com had less than 30 internal websites. In addition, North Koreans need to abide by strict regulations to access the Internet, and outsiders need special approval to contact them.

North Korea currently has more than three million 3G mobile phone users, who can connect to the Guangming Network without any obstacles, but it is impossible to connect to the Internet. In other words, ordinary people in North Korea cannot access GitHub, the world's largest gay dating website.

So what kind of technology did they develop this time? 

Facial recognition: specially designed for North Korean citizens' mobile phones

Recently, an external North Korean propaganda website announced an AI technology: the New High-Tech Center of Kim Il Sung University, a research institution, has developed a facial recognition technology based on AI and has begun to put it into practical use. It is said that the Blue Sky mobile phone equipped with this AI system can automatically recognize faces quickly and accurately, and can also be used to track the user's whereabouts.

This technical article states the development trend of artificial intelligence and states that in order to keep up with the trend of global artificial intelligence development, North Korea is strengthening its own AI technology research and development.

The article also analyzes that the focus of artificial intelligence research and development has shifted from the traditional method in the cloud computing environment to the distributed method in the terminal device. For example, the AI chip industry is currently developing in a highly competitive environment. In this context, researchers have developed a new AI chip based on ARM CPU.Developed a deep learning real-time facial recognition technology, and soon after, it was used on mobile phones, tablets and other devices. 

How to implement AI with only a local area network?

In North Korea, which only has an internal network and no Internet data or cloud computing environment, the difficulty of development is obvious. In order to facilitate the use of citizens, it needs to be implemented through independent portable terminals. The biggest problem to consider is how to ensure its practicality and accuracy under the condition of limited computing resources and insufficient data throughput.

The article points out that the system is based on the algorithm levelConvolutional Neural Networks (CNN),North Korean researchers claim that they used an optimized neural network with an efficient structure, and the model can perform recognition tasks accurately and very quickly.

also,Face detection is based on MTCNN, and face recognition is based on MobileFaceNets.Although the specific algorithm details were not disclosed, they claimed that they used Tensorflow  To implement and learn the neural network structure, the loss function is selected ArcFace Loss .

The algorithm model built from this includes 30 million facesThe training was carried out in the database and finally achieved good results. The application for mobile devices was developed through Android Studio.

In addition, North Korean researchers have developed facial recognition engines and application software in immersive devices.

At present, North Korea has applied facial recognition-related technologies to the smartphones they have developed. For example, the national mobile phone, the Arirang 151 of the Blue Sky brand, uses image analysis to perform face recognition. In newer smartphones (such as the Pyongyang 2425), face recognition technology is also equipped with infrared cameras to achieve this.

At an exhibition in North Korea on November 5, the Pyongyang Information Technology Bureau also released an AI-based facial recognition technology to perform real-time identification of pedestrian identities, license plate information, traffic monitoring, etc.

North Korea is also strengthening its AI capabilities

North Korea has always adhered to a network system that seems almost closed to outsiders. In the years when technology has developed the fastest, they are like a boat lost in the waves. Precisely because of its unique national conditions, this magical country has always been mysterious, and the news released by the few external propaganda channels is often difficult to distinguish between true and false.

But it is worth mentioning that IT practitioners in North Korea seem to be a top group of people, and their training and treatment are also given priority. Another well-known institution in North Korea, the Institute of Intelligent Technology, has also been reported.Korean speech and text recognition application.

It can translate English, Chinese and German materials from 30 natural and social sciences (including mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics and history) into Korean, which is comparable to translations in professional fields.

The report also stated that these programs have been put into use to investigate and analyze literature data from other countries, and the accumulated data has been provided to North Korean scientists and engineers for scientific research projects.

The head, Kumsu Kang, also said that the institute has also developed an AI-based production management system for factories and enterprises, including the Pyongyang trolleybus factory, the Pyongyang cosmetics factory's integrated production system (system), the integrated search system, and the production of skin analyzers.

When we talk about North Korea’s AI…

Perhaps to people who are familiar with the development of AI, North Korea’s AI technologies may seem commonplace, but if they are compared without considering the overall context, they lose their significance.

The true state of North Korea's technological development will only be revealed when they open their doors and join the world Internet.

Of course, the most crucial thing may still have to depend on the famous person born in the 80s.

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