VIJAYAWADA:Keeping abreast of the changing times, the Railway Protection Force (RPF) in the Vijayawada Division of the South Central Railway is adopting new technology to solve the crimes happening onboard the trains or on the platforms, according to SR Gandhi, Senior RPF Divisional Security Commissioner of the Vijayawada Division.
Stating this at a news conference here on Thursday, he added that it had recently acquired an advanced software for drawing portraits of offenders so as to obtain their identities and quickly solve various crimes.
Gandhi said that recently, a young man and his wife, travelling in the Kerala Express from New Delhi to Sevagram in Maharashtra, were drugged and robbed of their cash, mobile phones, ornaments and even their luggage by some unidentified miscreants before the train reached Nagpur.
“They did not know what happened to them and all they could remember was that they were given some food by three youths who boarded the train and befriended them. There was no other clue. But with the help of our newly-acquired software we drew the portraits of the accused as per the descriptions provided by the victims and sent them to the Railway Police along with other details like their physical descriptions, possible time and place of the offence, what was lost, etc., he added.
Stating that visual clues would greatly help them in expeditiously solving such cases, he added that of late, many such cases were being registered in Vijayawada. “There was a similar incident on the Howrah-Chennai express between Bhubaneswar-Visakhapatnam an another on the Link Express and the complaints were lodged here”, he said.
Stating that finding experienced artists for physically drawing the portraits of the suspects based on the descriptions provided by the victims was difficult and that the drawing of sketches was a time-consuming exercise, he added that often by sketches were not to the satisfaction of the victims. “To overcome these problems, we have procured the new software, where there are different modules for different facial features like hair, nose, ears, eyes, lips and forehead, with hundreds of variations. Even wrinkles can be added to the facial structure to get the near-likely images of the suspects. Since it is done in the presence of the victims, they can even make visual recognitions there itself,” Gandhi explained.
The digital image will be then sent to the Railway station where the crime had taken place and in coordination with the GRP, it can be cross-checked with available photographs of the known offenders. The RPF and the GRP in the Vijayawada Division maintains a database of known offenders, which was upgraded from time to time, Gandhi explained. He said that the software had been sent to all RPF units in the Vijayawada Division along with its user manual and the personnel there were being trained in their respective places itself.
Face Identification Software
The RPF in the Vijayawada Division of the South Central Railway is set to acquire a facial recognition software that will be linked to the CCTV feed, so it can identify any known criminal on the prowl in a railway station, according to SR Gandhi, Senior RPF Divisional Security Commissioner of the Vijayawada Division. “It will be similar to the technology shown in Hollywood flicks coming to the aid of cops to zero in on the offenders. The database of the known offenders will be linked to the computer getting feed from the close circuit cameras and the face identification software will automatically match any known offender’s image from the database with that of the suspect in the crowd and if a match is found, it will put out an alert,” he said.