Facial Recognition Technology: How Police Identify Criminals?

Automeme
3 min readOct 31, 2019

Major advancements are being made in the field of Facial Recognition technology but it is still in the early stages of development in the tech . Right now, it is possible to identify persons from a series of images provided if we have a small database from which the algorithm has to search from but if the database goes extensive with images of many persons, the time to pinpoint the person can exceed by a huge margin .

And in practical scenarios, we need results in a matter of seconds or so. So it is not convenient to deploy this tech right now but it still presents a promising future in the area of crime-fighting and tracking of fugitives .

Yet keeping in view the rapid advancement in technology and the advent of new algorithms in this particular domain, there are significant use cases of Facial Recognition particular in criminal combat which we can see below:

Identifying Suspects At A Crime Scene:

By using Facial Recognition with the combination of Azure Cloud Services or Amazon Web Services etc, if a police officer is wearing a helmet with a webcam and scanning a crime scene, he can identify suspects who have a past criminal history . It would need immense computing power but that would compensate through the use of cloud servers and connectivity on the go wherever the officers are . The biggest advantage of this would be to identify any suspects based on past criminal activity and detain them for questioning .

Verifying The Truth:

Another advantage of Facial Recognition would be to identify the suspect through police offer’s inquiry . If the suspect is not carrying his ID and tells the police officer a fake name, the wearable headset or glasses worn by the police officer would inform him about the person’s actual identity . Not only would this aid in the investigation but it will also help identify the culprit.

Foolproof Security At Critical Locations:

Facial Recognition can also help in ensuring foolproof security at critical locations for instance banks where the on-duty guard will be wearing glasses to identify the customers coming in and going out . In case a criminal comes, if the person has a previous history then the guard would know through the glasses and he would be able to take action . And even if the person is a new criminal, the identity of the criminal will send back to the cloud server from where the police force can take the necessary action as they have all the required details to find the culprit involved. The same approach can be implemented to CCTV cameras which alert the concerned department in case a hostile approach to the facility.

Conclusion:

While Facial Recognition may not be available in a lot of areas commercially these days, in the future, it presents a massive opportunity to change the way of working of many segments as can be seen above by its application in law enforcement agencies.

Story is Originally posted at https://autome.me on October 31, 2019.

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Automeme

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