‘Sight-the-criminal’ glasses for Pb cops

Jupinderjit Singh and Vijay C Roy

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Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 5

With specialised eyewear that will recognise a suspect and flash his or her criminal data on the glass screen — the Punjab Police are, indeed, set to go hi-tech. 

  The first in the country to enrol themselves with a pilot project started by a Gurgaon-based company, details of 80,000 criminals have already been fed into a server connected to the eyeglasses to be worn by the men in khaki. Gathering and feeding in data was an arduous exercise that took a year.

The eyewear, that looks like Google Glass (an optical head-mounted display designed in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses), can help spot a suspect in a crowd. Not just the criminal’s name, but his entire criminal history can be accessed in a few seconds.

“This technology is a quantum jump for prevention of crime,” said a senior police official, pointing out that it was not uncommon for criminals to walk past a police check-post without raising suspicion. “Smart glasses will solve the problem, recognising the iris and face contours, even if the criminal is disguised.” 

As of now, the police have to put up posters of proclaimed offenders to get a clue on their whereabouts and track them down. “Punjab has more than 6,000 proclaimed offenders who have been evading arrest for many years. A number of gangsters too are at large,” the police officer said. 

Explaining the ‘wonder glasses’, co-founder and CEO of the company Atul Rai says each of these have an in-built camera that “captures input” to trigger facial recognition. “Identifying the suspect from the digitised criminal database, it projects the results on the glass screen. The ‘smart glass’ fuses speech and image recognition to identify potential threats to society — criminals, intruders and terrorists. 

“We are taking the personal security feature to the next level, giving users a unique opportunity to stay alert and actively resist crime,” explains Rai, whose company has developed PAIS (Punjab AI System), an advanced artificial intelligence technology that can register,  identify and anticipate criminal activity.