This start-up plays the good cop by helping trace India's lost children

Gurugram-based Staqu uses AI-powered facial recognition and other innovations to achieve this end; Over 60,000 kids go missing each year, and 50% of those missing till 2016 remain untraced

In the American science-fiction crime drama series ‘Person of Interest,’ an artificial intelligence machine analyses government surveillance data to predict individuals who will be involved in a crime, whether as a victim or a perpetrator. What Gurugram-based startup Staqu Technologies does has an uncanny similarity to that reel world machine. It has developed a technology that enables the search for missing people in the country through AI-powered facial recognition and various other innovations. 

The AI-powered solution is currently live with three state-level police departments: Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh. It carries a database of more than 12,000 people that are missing. Staqu further plans to make the solution live in Punjab, following it up with more integrations with other state-level police departments.

In addition to digitising the records of missing people, Staqu is connecting its AI-based missing people solution with the CCTV footage and actively monitor the happenings to search for the missing Indians including children in real-time. It conducts hot-spot and geo-fencing analysis to enable the search. Under hot-spot analysis, Staqu’s AI solution studies historical records of missing people – the spots that criminals turned into hideouts or from where the child traffickers were nabbed in the past. This is further coupled with geo-fencing analysis. Once a child or person is reported missing, Staqu’s AI mulls over the data from nearby areas such as railways stations and bus stops -– locations within the six-hour radius or more, depending on the time since the person was reported missing. The quick and real-time analysis by Staqu generates leads for the police forces.

Atul Rai, co-founder and CEO at Staqu said the company first helped law enforcement agencies create a database of missing people where a police official could upload or find information about these persons using an app. 

Then the firm started doing active monitoring for finding people by running facial recognition technology on the data retrieved from cameras at various places such as bus stations, highways and railway stations. “If someone has kidnapped a child, the police station would immediately get alerts about the (last position) of those individuals,” said Rai. The firm is now implementing a predictive model where Staqu’s systems constantly monitor crime-prone areas and make a correlation with regions where most of the kidnappers belong to.  “For example, if a person is kidnapped in Varanasi and is found in Haridwar, you start doing ‘hotspot predictive analysis in those areas whenever people go missing again,” said Rai.

An alumnus of The University of Manchester, Rai founded Staqu in 2015 along with Anurag Saini, Chetan Rexwal, and Pankaj Sharma. The criminal search solutions by Staqu has already helped police forces solve over 1,100 high-profile and high-risk cases, carrying a database of over one million criminals.

The innovation of Staqu comes at a time when the cases of kidnapping and abduction have increased by 97 per cent over the last five years (2011-16), consequently, the conviction rates have declined by more than 23 per cent, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

India has also been suffering at the hands of child traffickers, kidnappers, and other miscreants. As per the records of NCRB, Staqu said over 60,000 children alone go missing each year and 50 per cent of children going missing till 2016 remained untraced.

The use of latest technologies such as AI, big data analytics, facial recognition and Internet of Things to identify and catch suspects and criminals, has gained much awareness among various law enforcement agencies, according to a recent Assocham-NEC joint study.

India has adopted multiple systems to assist the law enforcement agencies in creating data repositories which are helpful as databases and in developing analytical reports. These systems enable law enforcement agencies to act swiftly and perform efficiently to increase public safety and to reduce crime rates across India, said the report.

For instance, Third I Digital Platform, initiated by Maharashtra Police and Nashik-based Adivid Technologies assists in filing crime information through online forms and to automatically generate crime report and analytics on a daily basis. Pocket Cop Mobile Application has been initiated by Gujarat State Home Ministry and Gujarat Police.  It provides access to Gujarat Police to a database of 6.8 million criminals on an application which can be accessed through a registered smartphone with the Police department. Tamil Nadu Police department and Chennai-based FaceTagr have started a collaboration to scan and detect criminals via the use of surveillance cameras and smartphones.

From a tool to devise a national database of Citizen Identity, biometrics has also turned into a security tool for law enforcement agencies, according to Assocham-NEC report. Police have been taking fingerprints of criminals since the past 125 years. But the digitization of these processes and data has allowed police to uniquely identify criminals and suspects to develop a database of criminals.