Delhi to get 10,000 additional CCTV cameras with facial recognition

More facial recognition cameras are to be installed in select parts of Delhi, as part of the Ministry of Home Affairs’ costly Safe City Project.

According to MSN, the increase coincides with Independence Day celebrations in India, and follows the installation of 700 facial recognition CCTV cameras leading up to last year’s holiday.

The Safe City Project aims to “enhance urban security and surveillance infrastructure, including the establishment of an Integrated Command, Control, Communication & Computer Centre (C4I),” and the installation of CCTV cameras equipped with “facilities for video analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and facial recognition.”

When the system identifies an individual with a criminal record, it triggers an alert notifying local police. It can reportedly analyze footage from over a hundred cameras at once, match one million records in 200 milliseconds, and operate with images marred by bad lighting or blur. It is nominally intended to improve public security, especially for women, and to help identify known criminals.

Facial recognition deployments have thus far been focused in areas around the Red Fort where Prime Minister Narendra Modi gives his Independence Day speech. Police have now ordered installations in the Aerocity precinct near Indira Gandhi International Airport. Commercial establishments, including hotels and restaurants, are required to install a “sufficient number” of CCTV cameras to cover a 50-metre radius outside their premises. Footage must be stored for a minimum of 90 days.

Independence Day is today, August 15, The directive is in force until September 2. However, reports say much of the hardware, installed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), has “yet to be activated.”

The Safe City Project comes with a price tag of 798 crore rupees, which is nearly 8 billion dollars. According to Delhi police, they have already installed some 25,000 CCTV cameras, and their C4I has a facial recognition software database of around 350,000 criminals, with facial details. The new Safe City Project will see 10,000 CCTV facial recognition cameras added to the tally.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometric matching  |  cctv  |  facial recognition  |  India  |  real-time biometrics  |  smart cities  |  video surveillance