The Beijing West Railway Station has adopted an automatic face-recognition system to help passengers get into the station more quickly as the Spring Festival travel rush, known as chunyun, is approaching and as bookings began on Thursday.
A Global Times reporter saw passengers getting through the checkpoint within 10 seconds by placing their tickets on top of their identification cards and letting the machine scan the tickets' QR code. After the cameras record their faces and the system verifies the ID information, passengers are allowed to enter the station.
A woman passenger surnamed Lü told the Global Times that the new system is quicker and more convenient.
A senior citizen who preferred not to be identified complained that it took him more than 2 minutes to get through the system since he found it too complicated, and he said he prefers to have station staff check his ticket.
The automatic ticket-checking system is being pilot-tested at the station, but the staff also checked tickets, an anonymous staffer told the Global Times, adding that some passengers were not familiar with the system.
The reporter saw six passengers pass through the automatic checking system within a minute, while staff checked the tickets of three others.
The Beijing West Railway Station has adopted the automatic system since November and may expand its usage if everything goes well during the forthcoming Spring Festival travel rush, a staffer surnamed Li told the Global Times on Thursday.
The Beijing Railway Station also introduced the automatic system in November, chnrailway.com reported.
However, not all passengers could check in through the face-identification system, including those who bought student tickets or other kinds of discounted tickets, according to Li.
The reporter also encountered a group of foreigners in the station who still got their tickets checked by station staff.
Li said that foreigners who bring their passports cannot use the automatic ticket checking system for now.
The 2017 chunyun will begin on January 13, with an estimated 356 million people expected to take the train.
The Beijing Railway Station received 4.01 million passengers from February 4 to March 15 this year while the Beijing West Railway Station received 5.72 million, according to Beijing Daily.
The number of passenger trips reached 400 million from February 7 to 13, up 6.7 percent since 2015, the Ministry of Transport data showed.
