Thousands of children go missing every year in India, many victims of human trafficking. Facial recognition software is now helping reunite them with their families.
In a recent trial police in the capital New Delhi used the technology to scour photos from a government database called TrackChild, which combines reports of missing children filed with police and records of children being held in childcare institutions.
The program compared photos of around 60,000 missing children against roughly 45,000 held in care homes over the course of four days and managed to match 2,930. Efforts are now underway to get the children back to their parents, according to police.
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While it鈥檚 possible to search the TrackChild records based on things like name, when the child went missing and physical characteristics, the size of the database and patchiness of the records makes this a daunting task, says special commissioner of police R P Upadhyay, who oversaw the initiative.
鈥淭rying to connect them using parameters like height or age takes a lot time,鈥� he says. 鈥淲ith facial recognition it鈥檚 instant.鈥�
A missing generation
Official figures from India鈥檚 Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWDC) show more than 240,000 children were reported missing between 2012 and 2017. While some children are runaways the majority are taken by human traffickers, says Swati Jha from child rights charity Bachpan Bachao, which suggested the use of the software to the police.
Victims are either kidnapped or lured from their parents with promises of jobs and education. 鈥淭hese children are trafficked to Delhi and other metropolitan cities where they are placed as domestic help or child labour or even prostitution,鈥� says Jha.
Even when these children are rescued it can still be hard to get them back to their families, she adds. Years have often passed since they were kidnapped so they often don鈥檛 remember details that could help reunite them like their address and the sheer number of records makes it near impossible to search manually.
The charity realised that applying facial recognition software to the photographs of the children could present a workaround, says Jha. So they asked the Delhi High Court to聽make the MWDC, which controls the national TrackChild database, share photos with Delhi Police, which is responsible for tracking down missing children.
The police force procured commercial facial recognition software especially for the task and was able to match 2,930 records over the course of four days. Upadhyay says the force has plans to create web and mobile applications that will allow officers to quickly upload photos of children to see if they鈥檝e been reported as missing.
MWDC secretary Rakesh Srivastava says that following the successful trial in Delhi the ministry will now make TrackChild data available to any state police force that wants to carry out similar analysis.
He added that if it鈥檚 technically feasible they may seek to integrate facial recognition software directly into the TrackChild portal to allow records to be automatically matched, but that no formal plans have been made yet.
