India is developing the world’s biggest Facial Recognition System
Just like China, India is also planning to create a facial recognition system to identify and catch criminals, identify missing children or people, unidentified dead bodies and more. The system will store photographs of criminals and missing peoples.
The face recognition system will help authorities catch and spot suspected people. This will exponentially increase the power and ability of the police force and other authorities.
How face recognition technology works?
The face recognition database will store photographs of every citizen or just the criminals or other suspected people or missing people. Now all the CCTV cameras (private or Govt.) can connect to the facial recognition database and identify any specific person.
In short, all the people captured on surveillance cameras will be matched with the photographs stored on the facial recognition system. The system should show the results only if the accuracy is at least 90% which can be custom set. The system will be made so advanced that it can even recognize people in real-time within a few seconds. Even a sketch can be fed into the system for facial recognition.
The system can even detect crime patterns and help the authorities to plan accordingly.
A trial was run in Delhi and within 4 days the police identified almost 3000 missing children in just 4 days!
Now, you can understand how this system can be boon to a country where crime rates, terrorist attacks, and other heinous crimes happen every other day.
Some companies already have advanced face recognition technology like Amazon Rekognition, Microsoft face API, IBM Watson Visual Recognition, Google cloud vision and some more.
When will the system be available India?
The good news is the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has already asked for the bids. The bidding will close on 8 November 2019 and the winner will be announced the same day.
The govt. has named this project National Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS).
But not everything here is hunky-dory. Some people and organizations are calling it a direct violation of a person’s privacy. Some even claimed that the govt. can even mass surveillance on the public.
Experts have suggested to first have a proper framework to regulate this technology so the system can’t be misused. India doesn’t have any policy or even a blueprint for regulating this technology.
What do you think about how the system can help India fighting against terrorism, control crime rates and other heinous crimes. Should we have this system in our country? Let us know.
