It looks like India is planning to follow the Chinese government by setting up one of the world’s largest facial recognition systems as a part of modernizing the police force.
Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) conceptualized by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The government plans to distribute AFRS among various police organizations for information gathering, criminal identification, and verification of persons from digital images, photos, digital sketches, video frames and video sources by comparison of selected facial features of the image from an already existing image database.
The government will open bids next month and selected bidder has to set up a facial recognition system through surveillance cameras across India and also train the police force.
The Automated Facial Recognition System is going to help one of the world’s most understaffed police forces, which has one officer for every 724 citizens.
Automated Facial Recognition System can play a very vital role in improving outcomes in the area of Criminal identification and verification by facilitating easy recording, analysis, retrieval and sharing of information between different organizations. Its also going to be investigation enhancer for identification of criminals, missing children/persons, unidentified dead bodies and unknown traced children/persons.
NCRB also going to provide a mobile application (Android/Windows/iOS platform) so that it can be used easily and effectively by police personnel.
Automated Facial Recognition System is a long road for India — a nation with no data privacy laws with deteriorated standards of cybersecurity. So it will take time for the nation to develops a mass surveillance system as advanced as China.
