Photos: HP's Chinese media search lab

Hello, "stranger." This application, created by China's Tsinghua University, compares a mug shot from a video camera to facial photos stored in a database. It has a lower false-positive face-matching rate in benchmark tests than do competing search applications, Tsinghua officials claim. But it also has a higher false-rejection rate, meaning that it finds more so-called strangers, or unrecognized faces, than it should.

The system is currently used by the Chinese government for face recognition at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border. Hewlett-Packard wants to tailor it for PCs.