City techie creates app to help find missing children

After a series of discussions, the techie, along with his colleagues decided to tackle the issue. 

A team, led by Vijay, created an app that has a database for missing children and identifies them using facial recognition. The app, called Facetagr, has already been used to find 100 missing children across the country. 

“We have collected information and photographs of missing children from Government websites like Khoya Paya and Track Child, as well as by compiling the cases that are shared on social media platforms. Then, our software compares the missing person’s photograph with the database of found and rescued children with the help of facial recognition technology. 

While we are definitely not the first to create facial recognition-based apps, I have not seen facial recognition being employed for Indian faces with such precision before. Our software can compare a selected picture with over 3 lakh entries in our database in just 30 seconds,” explains Vijay. 

According to Track Child, almost five children go missing every hour in India due to kidnapping, abduction, trafficking, illegal adoption and displacement during natural calamities. Around 30 per cent of these children are never found. 

“Most of the time the children who are listed missing will also be listed in the ‘found’ section of the same government website. They identify missing persons based on names. But when it comes to Indian names, there are just so many different ways to spell the same name. 

So, more often, because the name is spelled wrong in one of the files – either because the child did not really know how to spell his/her name or because of clerical error – they never find a match. 

Facial recognition helps in such instances. When you feed in a photo, our software automatically identifies children with similar facial features in our database. In case the parents don’t have a photo of the missing child, a photo of the sibling or even one of the parents can be used to generate a possible list of matches from the database using the software. 

It can also identify the children based on their photographs from up to five years ago,” he adds. Vijay’s team is now in talks with the anti-child trafficking unit in Tamil Nadu and the Directorate of Social defence to incorporate facial recognition in its tracking system. It is also working on a project to track families of around 15,000 children from Nepal rescued while being trafficked into India. 

“We are giving 15 handsets with the app to volunteers there and working with another NGO to identify the families of these children,” says Vijay. However, the app is not open for public use just yet and not available on popular app-download websites. 

“Facetagr is a closed app at the moment because we want to make sure there are no legal issues for the app. We don’t charge any money for the service we provide and the information we collect is freely available on public platforms, but you never know. 

Besides, we don’t want this app falling into the wrong hands like those of kidnappers or traffickers. So, we are now trying to install security upgrades to ensure there are no safety issues. Once these have been dealt with, we will launch it as an open app,” he states.