iQIYI Announces Winners of "Celebrity Video Identification Challenge"

BEIJING, Nov. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- iQIYI Inc. (NASDAQ: IQ) ("iQIYI" or the "Company"), an innovative market-leading online entertainment service in China, recently announced the results of its "Celebrity Video Identification Challenge", an AI programming competition focused on video-based multimodal biometric recognition, held in partnership with the Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision (PRCV 2018).

A team from InfiniVision Corporation and the Imperial College London iBUG (DeepInsight) won the championship, with the Baidu VAR team receiving second place, and a team from Univer.AI and Beijing University of Technology coming in third. All of the top three teams used differing algorithms to improve the accuracy of video-based multimodal recognition technology. The winning team's solution achieved a mean average precision (MAP) of 88.65%. Based on the competition, iQIYI further increased the precision of its recognition technology by around 0.8%, representing a significant breakthrough in accurately identifying actors within vast amount of entertainment video data.

iQIYI provided participating teams with the world's largest dataset of celebrity videos (iQIYI-VID), consisting of 500,000 video clips of 5,000 celebrities totaling over 1,000 hours. The use of video makes identification more difficult than the photo-based datasets typically used in biometric recognition, requiring participants to deal with various factors such as face, pose, illumination, low resolution, gait, and clothing.

The AI technology developed during the competition is highly valuable for iQIYI for optimizing content production and user experience. The company has pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to increase efficiency in the casting process by selecting performers from their database according to the preferences of producers and users. iQIYI's AI technology also allows users to search shows and video segments by image for individual actors and actresses.

AI serves another important role in iQIYI's content monetization, as seen in the company's use of smart advertising. This utilizes AI recognition service to analyze video content, and identify the most appropriate brands to be shown as a part of in-video contextual advertising initiatives, serving to enhance the experience of consumers while increasing the returns of sponsoring brand partners.

"iQIYI would like to express our gratitude to all those who took part in this year's 'Celebrity Video Identification Challenge', as well as our warmest congratulations to our three winning teams," said iQIYI Chief Technology Officer Liu Wenfeng. "AI is already in the process of changing the entertainment industry, and iQIYI is proud to be at the forefront of this revolution. We will continue to work closely with AI R&D teams worldwide to explore the full potential of AI to bring users the highest quality online entertainment."

Almost 400 teams in the world took part in the competition. Team members included representatives from leading educational institutions New York University, National University of Singapore, Lund University in Sweden and Tokyo Institute of Technology, as well as teams from tech companies including Baidu, Xiaomi, Microsoft and more. The winning teams will be awarded at the Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision (PRCV 2018), November 23 in Guangzhou.

About iQIYI, Inc.

iQIYI, Inc. (NASDAQ: IQ) ("iQIYI" or the "Company") is an innovative market-leading online entertainment service in China. Its corporate DNA combines creative talent with technology, fostering an environment for continuous innovation and the production of blockbuster content. iQIYI's platform features highly popular original content, as well as a comprehensive library of other professionally-produced content, partner-generated content and user-generated content. The Company distinguishes itself in the online entertainment industry by its leading technology platform powered by advanced AI, big data analytics and other core proprietary technologies. iQIYI attracts a massive user base with tremendous user engagement, and has developed a diversified monetization model including membership services, online advertising services, content distribution, live broadcasting, online games, IP licensing, online literature and e-commerce etc. For more information on iQIYI, please visit http://ir.iqiyi.com.

SOURCE iQIYI, Inc.