How Can Facial Recognition make smart cities even smarter?

A smart city collects data from humans, assets, and devices for analyzing and optimizing traffic, information systems, and energy efficiency. Smart City also focuses on crime prevention, and this is where facial recognition comes in.

It is possible to prevent crime by incorporating facial recognition technology in a smart city. It can also help in accelerating investigations and ensuring that public places are safer than ever before. Here are some of the ways in which facial recognition can help smart cities.

1. Prevent Crimes Before They Take Place

Facial recognition can be used as an additional layer on top of the camera feeds. This will allow us to instantly match individuals against a database of wanted felons, known criminals, suspected terrorists, and individuals who might pose some threat. If a match is confirmed, then the movements of that person will be constantly tracked, and if any suspicious activity is detected, then that person can be flagged. This will alert the security and law enforcement personnel, and they will be better able to monitor that person. Dangerous individuals can be apprehended if need be. Hence crimes can be prevented before they are even initiated.

2. Find Victims of Human Trafficking and Missing Children

Around one million children go missing every year. But it will be easier to bring them home by using facial recognition. Smart cities will be able to add victims of human trafficking and missing children to their facial recognition database. If a missing child is recognized in a public camera feed, then authorities can be immediately alerted.

3. Protect Public Events

Public events are an attractive target for mass-shooters and terrorists. By installing cameras at public events, it will be possible to identify suspicious individuals who pose a threat. Security personnel at events have a very complicated job, and they do their best. But remembering the name and face of every suspicious individual is very difficult for them. On top of that, it is harder to recognize such individuals in a crowd. This problem can be solved by using facial recognition. As soon as a threat is detected, the relevant security person will be notified.

4. Accelerate Investigations

Facial recognition can accelerate investigations and hence make smart cities safer. Public cameras have been used in police investigations for years. But it is very time-consuming to search through hours of video fees for finding evidence manually. However, by using facial recognition can be utilized to increase the speed of forensic investigations considerably.

5. Control Access to Secure Areas

Smart cities can use facial recognition for controlling access to restricted areas in addition to surveillance purposes. Facial recognition is considered very secure, and millions of people trust facial recognition as a way of controlling access to their personal computers and mobile devices. However, facial recognition can also be used as a secondary or primary form of identification when controlling access to sensitive locations within a smart city such as water reservoirs, government buildings, power plants, and more.