More Indian states to have biometric surveillance in public places

More states in India have tendered biometric surveillance projects for some of their cities for facial recognition in public places.

The technology used for surveillance purposes seems to be attaining traction in India as two more state governments.

Odisha has unveiled a tender for the facial recognition project implementation in the third-largest city, Rourkela, under the Smart City Projects.

According to the tender, the facial recognition system being sought will be combined with IP video CCTV cameras and would be able to track people and examine patterns of demonstrations in crowds and identify people captured in numerous live streams at the same time.

The system should also be able to initially store up to 10,000 faces on a biometric watchlist in real-time and alert security staff when somebody is spotted in a restricted area. The tender also specifies the watchlist should be scalable to at least one million records.

Eventually, the company chosen to supply the system should ensure that it can easily capture images from different environmental conditions.

According to the tender, which also details that artificial intelligence-based video analytics will be installed in 110 cameras at various points across the city.

It also makes a listing of other key capabilities which the system must have, such as the ability to identify and authenticate based on individual facial features, detect a face from stored video of any format, detect a face from a photo, match faces from recorded media, and integrate with other systems in the future such as an automatic fingerprint identification system (AFIS), among other needs.

Authorities in Gurugram say about 1,000 more cameras will be established for surveillance purposes at various places across the Haryana, with attention to be paid to junctions where there is possible to be high traffic in the future due to population growth.

An official from the Smart city division of the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) said that they are looking forward to establishing these 1,000 cameras as part of the second phase of the project after 1,200 were set up across the city in the first. The cameras have been set up at key locations across the city.

Meanwhile, in Karnal, another city in Haryana, there is news that a couple of months after its inauguration, no facial recognition facility of the Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) project is functional yet.

In December 2021, the project was launched to oversee traffic and enhance security across the city's neighbourhoods. The project will establish 129 facial recognition cameras at 29 different locations, but the installation has occurred in just 10 of the areas.

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Also read: Ahmedabad to have 10,000 cameras to geofence public property