AT a highway check point on the outskirts of Beijing, local police are this week testing out a new security tool: smart glasses that can pick up facial features and car registration plates, and match them in real-time with a database of suspects.

The AI-powered glasses, made by LLVision, scan the faces of vehicle occupants and the plates, flagging them with a red box as a warning sign to the wearer when any match up with a centralized “blacklist.”

The test — which coincides with the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing — underscores a major push by the government to leverage technology and boost security in the country.

Wu Fei, chief executive of LLVision, said people should not be worried about privacy concerns because China’s authorities were using the equipment for “noble causes,” catching suspects and fugitives from the law.

“We trust the government,” he told reporters at the company’s headquarters in Beijing.

Reuters has verified that the glasses have been used in tests by the police to help identify suspect individuals and vehicles in the Beijing area in recent days.

China is making a major push to use artificial intelligence, facial recognition and big data technology to boost its economy as well as security.

Delegates and visitors entering the Great Hall of the People, the venue for the NPC, have to go through facial scanners. The same happened to those attending the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

“This year, security at the two sessions has some freshly-baked ‘black tech’ coming online,” wrote the Science and Technology Daily newspaper, using a comic-book term in China for futuristic surveillance gadgets.

The paper said cameras at the event had been upgraded to capture, analyze and compare suspicious faces in around two seconds, powered by a system called “Skynet” — which has a national database of blacklisted individuals.

“The plot of sci-fi film ‘Minority Report’ is now basically becoming a part of daily life,” the newspaper added, referring to the Tom Cruise movie set in a futuristic society where crimes are solved and punished before they even happen.

The new technologies range from police robots for crowd control to drones for monitoring border areas and artificially intelligent systems for tracking behavior online. There are also scanners than can forcibly read mobile phone data and even police dogs with virtual reality cameras.

At the meeting of the NPC, most delegates said the increasing use of technology to improve security was a positive, and that the benefits far outweighed privacy concerns.

“This is a good thing, it means our technology is really leading the world,” said Lu Yaping, a delegate from Jiangsu Province in eastern China. “I don’t have any concerns about safety.”

(SD-Agencies)