Police in Surat using advanced face recognition technology to curb crime

Police in Surat, Gujarat, have adopted a face recognition technology from a Japanese company to curb crime.

NEC India Pvt. Ltd., a leading Network and IT solution provider, and NEC Corporation, together with Innovative Telecom and Softwares Pvt. Ltd., recently announced the deployment of NEC's face recognition technology for Surat City Police.

NEC's NeoFace Watch for Live CCTV surveillance and NeoFace Reveal for forensic criminal investigation will be deployed across Surat as a safe city initiative.

Surat's Police Commissioner Rakesh Asthana said, "We have found NEC's face recognition solution to be the most appropriate solution with respect to face detection and investigation, and it will help Surat Police resolve crime cases in a very speedy manner."

NeoFace Reveal is a software solution for forensic investigation that provides law enforcement and crime laboratory agencies with the ability to enhance poor quality latent face images, search against their mugshot databases, and locate potential suspects, while NeoFace(r) Watch integrates with existing video surveillance systems and matches faces in real-time against a watch list of individuals to trigger an alert.

Koichiro Koide, Managing Director, NEC India said, "Safety is one of the most important aspects that goes into the making of a smart city. NEC continuously innovates to create and deliver safe city and smart city solutions. Our face recognition technology has been through stringent performance evaluations and an extensive proof-of-concept process by the Surat Police, and has performed highly in terms of speed and accuracy. We are committed to the Surat City Police in this partnership towards enabling a safer city, and we look forward to future collaborations."

Both technologies have been deployed successfully in numerous government agencies throughout the world, including the US, UK and Singapore.

"We along with the Surat City police have evaluated multiple face recognition solutions from various parts of the world and found NEC to be the most accurate, fastest and the best criminal investigation application amongst all," said Moin Shaikh, Director, Innovative Telecom and Softwares Pvt Ltd, who has implemented the Surat Safe City Project.

NEC's face recognition technology has achieved the highest performance evaluation for the third consecutive time in the recent Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2014 performed by the U.S National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Test results revealed NEC's search accuracy as well as the speed of its face recognition algorithms for image search outperforming competitors significantly.

The NIST report is considered an industry benchmark for assessing how accurate a face recognition software solution is in one-to-many searching in various circumstances.