3. FaceTagr

Within the past five years, more than 250,000 children have gone missing in India. Various factors make it difficult for families to find their loved ones. To combat this worrying epidemic, a Chennai IT developer named Vijay Gnanadesikan developed a closed application called FaceTagr. The app uses facial recognition technology to identify missing people. FaceTagr has amassed a photo database of nearly 300,000 missing children and has already identified and returned more than a hundred.

Vijay and his team have been surfing various central and state government websites and social networking sites to create a bank of photos of nearly three lakh children, some of them in government or private homes but missing from their families. “If you feed in a photo, our software automatically links it to children who look similar in our database,“ said Vijay , pointing to a photo of a four-year-old child beggar in Allahabad he chanced upon on Facebook. Vijay and his team have been surfing various central and state government websites and social networking sites to create a bank of photos of nearly three lakh children, some of them in government or private homes but missing from their families. “If you feed in a photo, our software automatically links it to children who look similar in our database,“ said Vijay , pointing to a photo of a four-year-old child beggar in Allahabad he chanced upon on Facebook. It matched with the picture of a boy on the Centre's Track Child portal reported missing from Haryana by his parents.

Chennai’s T. Nagar, arguably India’s biggest shopping district by revenues and crowded on any given day, gets even more packed in festival seasons as thousands throng its saree and jewellery stores. Every year, Deepavali, less than three months away this year, presents the perfect hunting ground for pickpockets and other petty thieves — and a headache for the local police.

This time, however, the city police have reason to believe it has a handle on things. It has a technology that analyses CCTV footage to spot, in real time, people with a criminal history visiting the T. Nagar area. “We are matching real-time CCTV video footage with our criminal database using the FaceTagr system and if any criminals are identified in that area, we get an immediate alert and we can further investigate,” says P Aravindan, deputy commissioner of police. Last year, FaceTagr, a face recognition software developed by an eponymous Chennai company, was used in a few areas with results that convinced the police to spread it to all of the T Nagar area, he adds.