Hyundai Mobis announced on March 13 to push ahead equity investment to build a strategic partnership with China’s Deep Glint, which has key technologies regarding object recognition and behavior pattern analysis utilizing artificial intelligence. The investment is valued at USD 5 million.

Deep Glint is one of the leading Chinese startups in computer vision technology utilizing artificial intelligence. The company is known for its world-class technology in recognizing and analyzing facial, body, and behavior patterns of individuals. The AI-based object recognition and analysis system of Deep Glint is known to be quick and accurate enough to correctly recognize a face of a target person among 1 billion people from a distance of 50m, within 1 second.

This equity investment is to secure in-vehicle facial recognition and behavior pattern analysis technology based on deep learning and an advanced artificial intelligence technology. Through this, Hyundai Mobis is planning to provide personalized connected service of controlling automated selection of music or lighting that best suit the driver and passengers’ needs, which AI identified through recognizing facial expressions. It is expected for vehicle passengers to have new mobility experience as Hyundai Mobis combines its vehicle infotainment technologies with facial recognition and behavior analysis technology of Deep Glint.

The technical cooperation between Hyundai Mobis and Deep Glint is expected to be carried out in such areas as vehicle security authentication, driver status monitoring and an in-vehicle virtual assistant.

Vehicle authentication uses facial recognition technology to authenticate the driver. If a driver is identified, the door of the vehicle will be opened or it will start. As more and more electronic devices in vehicle are being integrated, interest over vehicle security against hacking smart keys or even worse the whole security system arises. For this reason, the industry is devoting to introducing technologies of using multiple authentication methods, such as fingerprint recognition coupled with near field communication (NFC). If individual’s biometrics are added under security authentication process, which Hyundai Mobis can achieve with Deep Glint, security will be much enhanced compared to replying only on physical devices.

If in-vehicle cameras are used to recognize facial expressions of a driver, condition of he or she could be monitored. This would enable vehicle system to watch over situation and intervene at proper time if needed; driver will be able to get an alert when he or she dozes off while driving, or in a medical emergency situations. In such serious situations, vehicle security system will notice and give out proper alerts ahead to drivers or passengers.

Another area in which high-performance object recognition technology can be used, is reading emotions of driver and serving as a virtual personal assistant. Hyundai Mobis is planning to fully leverage the facial and behavior recognition and analysis system of Deep Glint to expand the tech cooperation to areas of V2X. Playing pleasant music and provide calming lighting for driver who seems to be tired could be an example.

Hyundai Mobis is planning on active and progressive invest in startups in areas of autonomous driving sensors, camera/radar/Lidar sensor fusion, battery cells, and fuel cells in order to quickly secure core future vehicle technologies by 2021.