Machine to recognize passengers' faces at a public transport station in Guiyang Photo: Courtesy of YITU Tech

Passengers are now able to take rail transit and bus rapid transit (BRT) using facial recognition technology in Guiyang, Southwest China's Guizhou Province. 

After registering a personal ID and binding bank card, passengers are able to take Guiyang Urban Rail Transit Line 1 and the main BRT routes after scanning their faces, without buying physical tickets or showing digital ticket codes.

Having been tested over a period of six months, the facial recognition platform developed by Shanghai-based AI firm YITU Tech has identified millions of faces and facilitated transport transaction payments totaling nearly 1 million yuan ($140,000) without a single error. 

The project aims to enable people in the future to consume and travel just by showing their faces, Jiang Chuan, head of the project at YITU, told the Global Times on Wednesday. 

The platform adopted facial recognition, speech recognition and natural language processing technologies, he added. 

Jiang stressed that the project in Guiyang is purely commercial, rather than government-led or for public welfare, and securing data is one of the key considerations of the project in the city of millions. 

The core principle of data protection is to obtain the users' authorization, he said. 

During the collection of human biological characteristics, the platform was designed to prevent people from passing as others by using their photos, videos or wearing masks, news outlet thepaper.cn reported, citing Jiang. 

As the provincial capital was once one of China's most impoverished regions but now known as "data valley," Guiyang has been striving to develop the big data industry for years, with world-renowned tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, IBM and Apple growing big data businesses in the city.

YITU said the project is a commercial exploration combining AI and big data technologies, and that it will become a remarkable project under China's new infrastructure initiative.