New App Helps Indian Police Reunite Missing Children with Their Families

Police in Telangana, India have developed a new facial recognition app to help bring thousands of missing and trafficked children home. Last month, they scanned over 3,000 records and reunited over half the children with their families!

“The results are very encouraging,” says senior officer Swathi Lakra. “Earlier, the big challenge was what to do with the children after we rescued them, with housing them in shelter homes for a long time not being the ideal solution. Tracing their families and sending them home was imperative.”

The app was part of Operation Smile, an initiative tackling child labor and missing children, and is constantly updated with data from shelters that take in children rescued from the streets or from slavery. According to a police statement, it can track up to 80 points on a human face to make it easier to search even old photographs. It’s also able to match a million records per second and uses phonetics when searching names of families or villages to avoid misspelt names from being dismissed.