The Spanish firm Herta has won a major biometric security contract in India that will see its facial recognition technology deployed across a large railway network.
The contract comes by way of Indian Railways, a state-owned national railway system of India, operated by the Ministry of Railways. It is one of the largest railway networks in the world, spanning over 67,000 kilometers of track and connecting more than 7,300 stations across the country.
The contract will see facial recognition-equipped cameras installed at 230 stations in an initial deployment phase, which Herta expects to complete this year. That effort will be followed by additional deployments in the north and west of India.
Founded in 2009 and based in Barcelona, Herta focuses on providing biometric solutions for various security applications, including access control, surveillance, and forensic analysis. In addition to facial recognition technology, Herta has also developed an emotion detection system based on face biometrics, dubbed “BioObserver”.
Indian Railways first announced plans to implement a biometric surveillance network in 2022, asserting at the time that the installation of the system would be carried out by Rail Tel, a Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) under the Ministry of Railways. Given the considerable extent of its railway network, work on this project appears to have extended considerably beyond Indian Railways’ initial timeline, which was meant to cover 756 stations in an initial phase that would conclude by 2023.
Source: Spanish Railway News
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June 13, 2024 – by Alex Perala
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