Almost 3,000 missing children were identified by Indian police in just four days after the start of an experiment using facial recognition technology. Police in New Delhi tested the system from April 6 to 10, checking about 45 thousand children living in orphanages throughout the city, 2 thousand 930 of them were reported missing.
Attempts are under way to reunite these children with their families, and Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), a community advocate for the rights of children, which proposed the use of the technology, now believes it can be used throughout India.
“Currently in India, almost 200,000 children are reported missing,” a BBA spokesman told The Better India.
“It's almost impossible for someone to manually check children from photographs,” they said.
So far, India's Ministry of Women and Parenting has used another system called TrackChild to try to find missing children. It is an online database where pictures of missing children can be uploaded and any information can be provided to the police and citizens.
Facial recognition technology allows police to check children and match them to images in this database.
If the facial recognition experiment succeeds completely, Indian officials hope that it can then be much more effective in addressing the issue of missing children.
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Past success
The post came just a week after The Independent reported how similar facial recognition technology helped reunite a mentally ill person with his brother in China.
The 31-year-old man has been in the hospital since January 2017, where he was taken after he was found wandering in Chongqing Station. Hospital workers were unable to identify the person, but technology showed that he came from Liangshan Yi Prefecture in Sichuan province, hundreds of kilometers away.
Sergey Lukavsky