Tencent Issues New Patents to Improve Efficiency of Payment by Facial Recognition

On Tuesday, Tianyancha App showed that Chinese tech giant Tencent had issued a patent for the method, device and equipment of a facial recognition payment system.

The patents relate to the technical field of intelligent payment and aim to reduce the waiting time of users and improve the efficiency of the system. Oftentimes, when users were going to pay for something, the transaction account identification was passed through the transaction client which triggered the facial recognition system. After successfully collecting the face image, the interface was then changed to the payment confirmation screen for users to confirm the purchase.

Through all of this, payment verification was always carried out in the backend system. After the users confirmed, the payment code was sent to the transaction client to complete the payment. The new patents will simplify this process and shorten the time it takes to make a payment using facial recognition.

Tencent‘s most recent financial report for 2021 shows that the company had an accumulated research and development investment of 51.88 billion yuan ($8.1 billion), a year-on-year increase of 33%. In 2021, Tencent continued to independently research and develop core technologies and achieved many breakthroughs in fields such as chips, operating systems, databases and servers.

Zhihuiya Innovation Research Center released a report in December last year showing that Huawei, Tencent, OPPO, BOE and State Grid Corporation of China are the five companies with the largest number of patents in China. The report was made according to the number of patent applications, patents for inventions, PCT applications and patent citations made over the last two years around the world.

According to a report published by the European Patent Office in early April, there were 16,665 patent applications received from China in 2021, which once again set a new record for Chinese patent applications in the European Patent Office, with a year-on-year increase of 24%.

SEE ALSO: Huawei Unveils Several Patents for Autonomous Driving, Chips and Face Recognition

Huawei applied for 3,544 patents in Europe in 2021, ranking first. The company has recently issued many patents, covering chips, automated driving, face recognition and other fields. OPPO, ZTE, Baidu, Xiaomi and Tencent also ranked among the top 50.