Cheetah Mobile wades into artificial intelligence

Cheetah Mobile's booth at an expo in Beijing, April 30, 2016. [Photo/VCG]

BEIJING - Chinese tech firm Cheetah Mobile has said it plans to continue to develop artificial intelligence.

Last week, Beijing Orion Star Technology, owned by Cheetah, won the first place in an online competition organized by Microsoft to recognize a million celebrities in the real world.

Founded in September last year, Beijing Orion Star won the first place in the competition category with external data support. Competitors included teams from Singapore, the United States and other countries.

"We use algorithms to discern interfering data and designed special computing models to improve efficiency," the company said in a statement.

Its facial recognition technology has been used to screen images on the company's live-streaming portal, Live.me. The technology is used to classify users in by gender, age and race.

Over 200,000 hours of live-streamed content is generated on the platform a day, and facial recognition is used to pick up unhealthy content from the videos, the company said.

Beijing Orion Star is also wading into voice recognition. It has used its technology on smart loudspeaker boxes developed by phone maker Xiaomi.

"The opportunities of deep learning is not simply about technology itself, but more about application in real life. Artificial intelligence will be used in wide application areas in the industrial world, and this is the focus of our technology research," said Fu Sheng, company CEO.

According to an industry report, starting from 2012, Chinese facial recognition patents have caught up with those in the United States. Many Chinese tech firms have been honing their edge in the industry.

By May, patents applications in facial recognition had reached 6,432 in China. In 2016 alone, there were 1,755 applications.

Cheetah Mobile says 600 million people use its apps worldwide and 80 percent of the users are from overseas.