Facial Recognition System Saves Thousands of Missing Children
India has an alarmingly high number of children that have gone missing in the past few years. Out of India’s massive population of around 1.32 billion people, it is estimated that around 242,000 children have gone missing in the past five years alone. Many of these children end up homeless, or in shelters. Something had to be done to save the lives of these children who have been separated from their families.
An unprecedented approach has just been used in its first trial run; Indian government officials have started using facial recognition technology to identify the faces of some of the missing children.
Many people are distrustful of facial recognition technology in general, but the Indian government just identified around 3,000 children using facial recognition technology in just four days. This was a trial run for the recognition system. The system uses a database called TrackChild, which uses previous images that were posted of the missing children, and authorities input more current images of the children. The system then matches them to current images of them. The TrackChild database uses cutting-edge technology to do this. It takes many factors into account when pairing images such as size, three-dimensional shape of the face, and even texture of the skin. The children that were identified are now in the process of being reunited with their families.
The Indian government has stated that they are in the process of further improving the software and want to perfect it before using it to identify children on a more widespread scale. It is imperative that they move forward with this technological advancement because of how successful the trial run was in such a short period of time.
With this kind of technology, there will definitely be some privacy concerns, and skeptics who may not trust the use of such an advanced system. Many people are already skeptical about the use of any kind of facial recognition technology. I cannot tell you the number of times that I have heard people complain Apple’s use of the facial recognition system to unlock the iPhone X, let alone a much more advanced facial recognition system in the hands of a government agency.
We need to just have faith in such technologies, and have faith in the agencies that use them. This is a piece of technology that cannot fall into the wrong hands, so there definitely need to be security features implemented when using it. Based on the success rate, however, I think it would be foolish to not further develop such pieces of technology. The lives of thousands of children have just been changed for the better, but there are still thousands more that need to be reunited with their families.
