US-Sanctioned AI Unicorn Ready for IPO; YOLOX Best Object Detector; Alipay Recognizes Pet With Noseprints
China’s AI news in the week of July 25, 2021
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CloudWalk receives green light to go public in Shanghai
In the past six months, China’s leading AI and face tech developers like Megvii, YITU, and CloudWalk, known as three of China’s “four AI dragons”, were vying to go public on the domestic Shanghai Stock Exchange. However, they stumbled upon tightened regulations in getting the green light of IPO, challenged by the stock exchange regarding their grant financial loss, murky commercial prospect, and privacy concerns. Yitu and Megvii have withdrawn their IPO applications in the past weeks.
The good news is the Shanghai Stock Exchange has accepted the IPO application of Cloudwalk on Tuesday after the Guangzhou-based AI upstart updated its financial data in early June. The company is planning to raise RMB 3.75 billion yuan.
A spinoff from Chongqing Institutes of Green and Intelligent Technology (CIGIT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), CloudWalk was founded in 2015 specializing in computer vision and machine learning. Founder and CEO Dr. Zhou Xi, who holds 24% of the company’s shares, is an apprentice of the revered Dr. Thomas Huang, one of the leading figures in computer vision.
According to its prospectus, CloudWalk reported its annual revenue of RMB 484 million yuan in 2018, RMB 807 million yuan in 2019, and RMB 755 million yuan in 2019., with a net loss of RMN 200 million yuan, RMB 1.763 billion yuan, and RMB 720 million yuan, respectively. The company strikes a much better balance between revenue and net loss compared to its peers Yitu and Megvii.
CloudWalk positions itself as an AI company that provides efficient human-machine collaborative operating systems (mostly facial recognition software, SDK, and cloud management systems) and industry solutions (mostly facial recognition edge devices like cameras and face scanner). Its products and services are widely used in sectors like banking (400+ finance clients), governance (schools and administrations), transport (airports), and commence (shopping centers).
China's face tech developer proposes YOLOX that exceeds all YOLO Series
YOLO (not “you only live once” but “you only look once”) is the best-performing real-time object detector series. Recently a team of developers from China’s face tech developer Megvii introduced a variant of YOLO that outperforms all YOLO series, including the latest YOLOv5.
In the paper YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021, researchers switched the YOLO detector to an anchor-free manner — contrary to the anchor-based detectors in YOLOv4 & v5 — and set the YOLOv3 as the baseline framework. With additional detection techniques such as a decoupled head and the leading label assignment strategy SimOTA, YOLOX surpassed other state-of-the-art YOLO models across different settings:
YOLO- Nano (0.91M parameters and 1.08G FLOPs) surpasses NanoDet by 1.8% AP on COCO;
Boost YOLOv3 to 47.3% AP on COCO, 3.0% higher than the best practice
YOLOX-L achieves 50.0% AP on COCO at a speed of 68.9 FPS on Tesla V100, exceeding YOLOv5-L by 1.8% AP.
YOLO-X has been open-sourced in versions with ONNX, TensorRT, NCNN, and Openvino at https://github.com/ Megvii-BaseDetection/YOLOX. The technology also helped elevate the Megvii team to 1st place on Streaming Perception Challenge at the Workshop on Autonomous Driving at CVPR 2021.
Ant’s Alipay recognize noseprints to help find your pets
It is common sense that your fingerprints are unique and no two are the same. But did you know that noseprints are also unique to pets?
Alipay, China’s largest mobile and online payment platform owned by Ant Group, recently added a new feature that allows pet owners to find their lost pets using noseprint recognition. You only need to create an ID first for your pet by taking a picture of its noseprints and building a record, along with its photo and contact information. Should your pet gets lost, you can report the claim to Alipay and hope someone finds it and contacts you by successfully comparing the noseprint.
Alipay has opened up its noseprint recognition technology to partners like city management and insurance companies. Last year, Alipay launched its first-ever insurance program for cats and dogs.
Ant Group is not the only company that develops similar technologies. In 2019, Megvii rolled out a dog noseprint program in its mobile Megvii app. Users can register the dog by scanning its snout through their phone cameras. The difference is Alipay adds cat recognitions by taking fur color, eyes, and other features into account.
Investment news
InferVision, a Chinese upstart in medical artificial intelligence, announced it has completed its D2 funding round, totaling its Series D funding to almost RMB 900 million yuan. Founded in 2016, InferVision specializes in AI-powered diagnosis technologies. Last year, the company made headlines by using its AI in imaging machines to detect COVID-19 viruses.
Chinese autonomous vehicle upstart WeRide has acquired autonomous trucking firm MoonX.AI. The acquisition amount wasn’t disclosed. MoonX.AI Founder and CEO Qingxiong Yang, who was also a co-founder of WeRide and left the company in 2018 to establish MoonX.AI, will re-join the company as Vice President and Dean of WeRide Research Institute, bringing over 50 engineers.