At KFC China - People pay Bill by Smiling.

Recently Alipay has launched a new payment method to pay your bill at KFC China. You can pay by smiling. So far, facial payment system is only available in KFC Hangzhou, China. The company behind the technology is Ant Financial, an Alibaba subsidiary, says its very simple to Smile and Pay technology needs about one to two seconds of facial recognition with a 3D camera and live-ness detection algorithm to check the identity of person paying, who must also enter the mobile phone number to security against fraud. Beta version of Smile to Pay was introduced in 2015 by Jack Ma the founder of Alibaba.

The facial-recognition payment technology offline was not a easy task,” said Jidong Chen, head of bio-metric identification technology at Ant Financial. Then how we detect when someone’s photo is being manipulated when someone is falsely impersonating another person. we prevent this by merging software and hardware by linking sophisticated algorithms with the 3D camera. We can prevent bio-metric spoofing. According to Ant Financial, the algorithm can detect shadows and other features to test if the person standing in front of the camera is actually a person, and not a photo or video used to trick the payment system.

Detailed Video shows how the payment process works, one young woman uses the machine in a variety of different appearances with minimal make-up, heavy make-up, and an assortment of wigs. The machine was shown to accurately recognise her facial features each time for payment.

The KFC shop that offers the facial payment system is a healthier version of the chain called K Pro which sells salads, juices, and paninis instead. K Pro was introduced in July as a way to entice younger customers looking for healthier food options.