Key facts
- Hong Kong police said facial recognition will be added to the Sharp Eye CCTV system in November 2026.
- All 60,000 cameras across the city are expected to carry the function by 2028, police said.
- Facial recognition data will be retained for no longer than 180 days, Senior Superintendent Leung Ming-leung said.
- Images will not be stored for more than 31 days, Leung said, citing cost and legal requirements.
- The Sharp Eye program had helped solve 2,192 criminal cases as of the end of October 2026, Leung said.
Hong Kong police will enable artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition across their expanding smart surveillance network in November 2026, the force said, to improve the tracking of missing persons or suspects. The force said it plans to keep the data the system generates for up to 180 days.
Police said the technology is widely used by law enforcement agencies around the world and stressed that residents' privacy rights would be protected. "Leveraging AI [facial recognition] would cut the time we..." an official said, according to the primary report.
The force said the facial recognition function had already been tested successfully. In one case, officers located an 80-year-old man with dementia within about 90 minutes of receiving a report, and in another the system identified a robbery suspect's facial features and detected his movements after the crime, leading to an arrest, according to CLB.org.hk.
Senior Superintendent Leung Ming-leung of the Force Operations Department described the introduction of facial recognition as equivalent to having additional officers working around the clock to monitor CCTV feeds for missing persons and suspicious individuals, CLB.org.hk reported. He said the technology would speed up investigations and reduce the need for officers to manually review large amounts of footage.
Leung said the technology is accurate and a mature, reliable investigative tool already used by law enforcement agencies in mainland China and overseas, according to CLB.org.hk. To protect personal data and privacy, the system requires authorisation before use, with applications made by specially trained personnel and approved by officers of inspector rank or above, and a review is conducted after use.
As of the end of October 2026, the Sharp Eye program had helped solve 2,192 criminal cases, Leung said, according to CLB.org.hk. He said images will not be stored for more than 31 days, while facial recognition data will be retained for no longer than 180 days.
Singtao USA reported that police aim to raise CCTV coverage across the city to about 60,000 cameras by 2028 and are in talks with private institutions including large shopping malls to connect their systems to the Sharp Eye network, with the first mall cameras expected to be connected by the end of 2026. It said facial recognition feature data will be stored longer than the 30 days applied to ordinary footage.