Telangana’s Information Technology, Electronics & Communications Department, after having successfully launched the face recognition technology app for the benefit of pensioners to obtain ‘life certificate’ for the first time in the country, now wishes to extend it to other forms of governance.
To begin with, the department through Chief Secretary S.K. Joshi has sounded the Election Commission of India (ECI) to try out three factor identification of this technology to clean up voters list of multiple Elector Photo Identity Cards (EPICs) and duplicates.
The face recognition technology, currently being tested in Hyderabad and Bengaluru airports, has been adopted by the IT Department to enable pensioners to ‘prove their existence’ to respective banks, sub-treasury offices or Meeseva centres.
T-App selfie
All it needs is a ‘selfie’ from a smart phone or a ‘live’ photo taken by any of the kith and kin routed through the ‘T App folio’ and this is immediately cross-checked with the available records. Technology can easily make out if the photo is that of a ‘live’ person or just a photo. So far 4,000 pensioners made use of it and more are expected from November onwards when the annual ‘liveness certificate’ is required to be submitted.
“We did a soft launch in April and are very pleased with the application. We expect more pensioners to make use of the technology as they need not go to any office and only need access to a smart phone. Since most citizens have to go to government offices for establishing identity, this technology has immense potential to change the governance rules,” says Commissioner (Electronic Service Delivery) & Special Commissioner (e-governance) G.T. Venkateswar Rao.
Immediate resonance could be in cleaning up electoral lists as the Aadhaar biometrics identity link-up was halted by the Supreme Court. “Face recognition is not only digitally verifiable but is also quick with least manual intervention and is highly accurate with three factor verification. There is no need for fingerprint or Iris scanners,” says Mr. Rao.
AI based
With help of artificial intelligence based liveness testing, big data mining and deep learning based image comparison apart from biometrics, it is possible to identify a person through a photograph, even if there are certain changes in the profile over a period of time of even 20 years.
It was to be tested it in recent local body polls but top officials decided to sound the ECI as it is the custodian of voters lists and this solution could facilitate its objective of ‘One Voter, One EPIC Card.’ With help of a smart phone or tab, a one time authentication of voters identity can easily be established during summary revision of electoral rolls in real time for issuance of digital EPICs, he adds.
