Tamil Nadu IPS officer’s app gets national acclaim

CHENNAI: Facetagr, the face-recognition mobile application developed by Tamil Nadu cadre IPS officer P Aravindhan and his team, is garnering much acclaim.

The application has helped police identify profiled criminals in the state. Taking a leaf out of a report submitted by the IPS officer to the National Police Academy (NPA) and the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BP&RD), a full-fledged ‘national automated facial recognition’ (AFR) system has been rolled out across India.

NCRB, the nodal agency, has floated tenders to be finalised on November 8. After this, Facetagr will become one of the world’s largest facial recognition system to track criminals. AFR is a part of the police modernisation process, apart from information gathering, criminal identification, verification and its dissemination among various police units across the country.Tiruvallur superintendent of police P Aravindhan said, “It was a detailed presentation at the NPA in Hyderabad, as a part of mid-career training programmes held there.”

Elaborating on his submission, he said his presentation was on the lines of coordinating the data available with all state police units and sub-units. “All the data shall be put in a database to be accessed by the ‘Facetagr’ mobile application, so that anyone can access and verify credentials of any suspect across India,” he said.

The application, he said, will prove a handy tool in identifying criminals, missing children, missing people and unidentified bodies across the country. Facetagr will also serve as a repository of photographs of criminals, which would help police detect crime patterns and modus operandi across states, he said. With the help of this application, police personnel can verify suspects vis-a-vis a database of criminals, he said. The application has helped Chennai police to resolve many pending cases. Facetagr has been installed in most patrol vehicles and helps police verify credentials of any suspect detained at any location in the city.

According to NCRB, the automated facial recognition system, when implemented, will help in quick identification and verification of suspects using digital images, photographs, digital sketches and screenshots by comparison of selected facial features of the image and linking it to a central database.