Live facial recognition coming to Chandigarh, India security center

A new hub for cyber security is to be opened in India. The Times of India reports that the Centre for Cyber Operations & Security (CenCOPS) in Chandigarh will be equipped with live facial recognition, data analysis and predictive policing tools, and come with a price tag of 880 million Indian rupees, or about US$10.7 million.

The center, which is the first of its kind in India, will tap into a CCTV network and scan for profiles that match an existing face biometrics database of wanted criminals. When the cameras spy a fugitive, an alert will go to the local police. The system will be based in Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab and Haryana states, but its capabilities will be available to law enforcement in neighboring states.

The Indian government has also sought to deploy live facial recognition in public spaces in the Jammu and Kashmir region.

The Times also reports that the center will also collect and analyze data from social media and other sources for predictive policing. The report does not contain specific details on what kind of information will be scraped from social media, nor what the other sources of data will be.

Chandigarh is the nodal agency of the Joint Cyber Crime Coordination Team, which is part of the larger Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) scheme to address cybercrime in a coordinated manner. The city in the north of India (which was designed by the architect Le Corbusier) was an early adopter of biometric systems for institutional use.

Cyber fraud is on the rise in India, and is a particular issue in Haryana state. As reported in the Tribune of India, last week in Chandigarh, three men were arrested for committing numerous cases of cyber fraud.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  cctv  |  criminal ID  |  facial recognition  |  India  |  police  |  real-time biometrics