ladbible logo

To make sure you never miss out on your favourite NEW stories, we're happy to send you some reminders

Click 'OK' then 'Allow' to enable notifications

Facial Recognition Software Finds 3,000 Missing Kids in Four Days

Facial Recognition Software Finds 3,000 Missing Kids in Four Days

Revolutionary software used to identify some of India's 200,000 missing kids and will now be used to reunite them with their families.

Mike Wood

Mike Wood

Facial recognition technology has identified 3,000 missing children in India within just four days of being used, according to the Indian government.

New Delhi police began using the system on 6 April and tested 45,000 kids currently housed in children's homes all over the city and then cross-referenced the results with pre-existing lists of missing children, with the upshot being that 2,930 were identified.

The success of the operation may now lead to the children being reunited with their families and the technology being rolled out into the rest of India.

India's Ministry of Women and Child Development commissioned the scheme, which was run in New Delhi on a test basis with the hope that it might provide a solution to the problem of missing children in India.

"India currently has almost 200,000 missing children and about 90,000 lodged in various child care institutions," said a spokesperson for Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), the children's rights organisation that was behind the campaign.

PA

"It is almost impossible for anyone to manually go through photographs to match the children."

The Indian government currently uses a different system, TrackChild, which allows families that have lost a child to upload a photograph of them to an online database that police can use to help find the missing child. With such success in the initial trial, it is now hoped that the new scheme can be used on a larger scale.

A spokesman for the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights in India said: "If such a type of software helps trace missing children and reunite them with their families, nothing can be better than this."

A similar scheme has been put into use in China in recent months, where a mentally ill man was reunited with his family using that country's huge facial recognition network.

A 31-year-old was found walking in a confused state at a train station in Chongquing in January and had baffled doctors and investigators in the city, only for facial recognition software to identify him as a man from Sichuan, hundreds of miles away. His brother was then contacted and the pair were reunited.

There have been criticisms of the scheme, with privacy advocates claiming that facial recognition software is an invasion of privacy that involves no consent from the people being monitored.

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: World News, News, India