NEC Corporation is going to provide Surat City Police, in Gujarat, India, with facial recognition technology, according to a TelecomTiger article. The company’s NeoFace Reveal and NeoFace Watch systems will be implemented by the police force to match faces against criminal databases for investigations, and to perform real-time facial recognition scanning on CCTV video, respectively.
Surat City Police Commissioner Rakesh Asthana spoke to the high quality of the technology and its ability to help police do their work more effectively, saying, “We have found NEC’s face recognition solution to be the most appropriate solution with respect to face detection and investigation, and it will help Surat Police resolve crime cases in a very speedy manner.”
Indeed, India is no stranger to this kind of technology. When US President Barack Obama visited the country last month, security forces tasked with protecting him and other officials used real-time facial recognition scanning to surveil the crowds gathered to see the dignitaries. More broadly, India is a global pioneer with respect to its embrace of biometric technology, with the federal government undergoing a massive project to build a biometric registry of all citizens.
The use of this kind of biometric technology by police forces is on the rise worldwide, too. There have been several recent deployments of fingerprint and face scanning systems in North American police services, for example, and more are on the way. While such deployments can sometimes stir up controversy, the technology is undoubtedly found useful by police.
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February 26, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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