Digital Barriers has announced that it will be making its live facial recognition software available at no cost to national and local authorities and agencies in the UK involved in the search for missing young people. As seen recently on BBC Newsnight, the automatic facial recognition system SmartVis Face was built around machine learning, originally with the purpose of tracking criminals and terror suspects against watch lists.
Digital Barriers’ CEO, Zak Doffman said: “SmartVis facial recognition has been designed to enhance the technology in use by law enforcement and security agencies in the fight against terrorism and serious crime. This same technology can also be used to combat the growing problem of missing and vulnerable young people passing through our towns and cities. Now we are making SmartVis facial recognition software freely available to UK agencies and authorities focusing on finding missing young people. If the agency or authority provides access to suitable cameras and PCs, we’ll do the rest and we will also make smartphone licenses freely available. At the same time we will engage with the suppliers of cameras and processing hardware to seek to engage them in this donation. Launching widespread facial recognition to help search for vulnerable missing young people is clearly an exceptional benefit of this new technology and we want to ensure that it’s widely available.”
