Beware! If you take wearing a mask lightly or covering your face with a piece of cloth, the hawk eyes of Telangana police will track you and a police team will approach you in just a few minutes.
For the first time in India, police here have decided to roll out Artificial Intelligence (AI) based face mask violation enforcement.
Speaking to The Hindu , a senior officer at the DGP office said that leveraging computer vision and deep learning techniques is being implemented on surveillance cameras across three urban police commissionerates — Hyderabad, Cyberabad and Rachakonda — to recognise people who are not covering their faces while moving on the streets.
“The initiative to use the latest technology developed by our IT team with the help of AI is the first of its kind in the country. So far, law enforcement agencies or for that matter any government department has not used this technology anywhere,” he said.
He said that police will identify erring persons through the video analytics of various CCTVs and immediately concerned police will be alerted.
Within a few minutes, police will approach the violator with evidence and warn him to wear the mask.
“Though the government has issued a GO to penalise the person who is not wearing a mask, for the initial few days we want to create awareness before we start penalising such a person, as the system on trial run,” the officer said.
He said that CCTV cameras across the three commissionerates are upgraded to identify the violators.
“Already our men on the field are questioning those not wearing masks. People should maintain discipline to contain the spread of coronavirus. Wearing a mask is an important step to contain it,” he said.
The core IT team at the DGP office was developing the new system since the day the State government made masks mandatory while moving on the streets, he added.
