Recently, the news of ourBaby Searching with AI volunteer teamto help missing children return home has attracted a lot of attention. This topic even ranked second on the Weibo hot search list on April 16th, and media such as People's Daily reported that our doctoral student Sheng Jianzhong's“Baby Searching with AI Volunteer Team: Making Finding Lost Children No Longer Lonely”has gone viral. AI image restoring technology, children searching public welfare, and winning a gold medal in the entrepreneurship competition; Ranked second on Weibo's hot search list, with more than 140 media outlets including People's Daily reporting and reprinting, behind these words lies this excellent student team. What kind of team is this? What kind of story do they have?
Assisting in finding lost kids: reuniting the broken family.
By chance, Dr. Sheng Jianzhong from the School of Software Engineering came across a piece of information about a missing child's parent searching for their family but found that the provided photo was particularly blurry. He then came up with the idea of using AI technology to repair the missing kids’ photos.
Subsequently, he began to form a team to jointly develop artificial intelligence algorithms for repairing old photos of missing children. After repeated training and testing of the algorithm, they finally applied three major technologies: "global repair", "face enhancement", and "super-resolution reconstruction", successfully breaking through the problem of repairing facial features of damaged old photos.
With technological breakthroughs, the team is committed to transforming the research and development of technology into assistance in finding missing kids. They pioneered the use of repaired high-definition photos as "children searching tape" to assist in kidstracing. At the end of 2020, they began designing "children searching tape". In March 2021, the "children searching tape" with information about missing children was successfully launched, causing a nationwide sensation. The related topic received hundreds of millions of clicks and was followed and reported by CCTV-1, CCTV-2, and CCTV-13 three times, receiving high social praise. Not only that, they also actively contact public security organs, public welfare organizations, and news media to improve the accuracy of technical investigation and carry out large-scale cooperative missing children searches, effectively spreading family search information to society, and turning isolated and helpless family search into society-involved search.
In addition to repairing photos of missing children, the team has also applied AI-restoring technology to more aspects. Before the Qingming Festival in 2021, the Ministry of Veterans Affairs launched the "Search for Martyrs' Relatives" campaign. The team successfully repaired multiple photos using AI algorithms and used them to make posters. Afterward, they will post these repaired photos and identity information of the martyrs, as well as provide official search clues on the team's account and webpage. The team also attempted to repair black and white photos of meritorious scientists and model figures such as Qian Xuesen, Yuan Longping, and Zhang Guimei when they were young and used AI technology to dynamically process the characters in the photos to create short videos. With the help of AI, People can pay tribute to heroes and remember them more clearly.
Went viral and pooled more strength of missing children.
On November 14, 2022, the team won the gold medal in the national competition of the public welfare group " A Tourto BuildRed Dream of Youth" in the final of the 8th China International "Internet+" Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition; Simultaneously won the national silver medal in the 9th “Chuang Qing Chun” China College Student’s Entrepreneurship Competition. These achievements embody the persistent hard work of each team member and the original intention and responsibility of technology empowering lost children search; It also cannot be separated from the strong assistance and support of school teachers. With every effort they have made and every expectation they have got,they, as a bright and vibrant flame are gradually becoming a blazing fire.
