Face recognition safety solution to protect children in schools

Safety and security of children is increasingly becoming a major concern in schools across the country. In view of the rising crime cases in schools that have raised serious questions on the safety of school-going children, a tech firm has rolled out an AI-based solution called SchoolProtect to address the issue.

The SchoolProtect safety solution has been developed by ShepHertz. Powered by ShepHertz Applied Artificial Intelligence and Geofencing services, the comprehensive security solution can elevate the current scenario in Indian schools by using the existing cameras and applying intelligence on them, the company claims in a statement.

"AI is not more a technology restricted to research labs. In the coming years from now, AI will have a similar impact on our lives as internet has. With SchoolProtect we aim to make schools and students in transit safer. This technology will allow parents and school management to monitor in a better way, have more control and increase the overall level of security," said Siddhartha Chandurkar, Founder & CEO, ShepHertz, in a release.

SchoolProtect features -

• Intruder detection that can identify criminal element and prevent intrusion of any kind.
• Detect attendance through face recognition and geo fencing.
• Track staff, students, visitors and vendors, anomaly detection
• Comprehensive analytics – descriptive, predictive and prescriptive.

Ever since stories broke out on several tragic incidences in schools where a lot of students were put in harm’s ways, it has become extremely difficult for parents to have the same trust in the school management as they had earlier.

Although UGC goes at great lengths to ban ragging from all schools and colleges, statistics show a saddening trend.  A total of 917 cases were registered in 2017 compared to 515 the previous year, and these do not include the incidents that went unreported. SchoolProtect aims to address and solve all these issues, according to the statement.

The company claims - facial recognition solution works by matching the faces in the camera footage against a registered database of photographs. The solution can fetch attributes of recognized faces such as the name of the students or faculty members, their division, their parents/spouse, and their age.

Along with the ability to detect known and unknown people on the TV monitor, its intelligent alarm system will be able to pro-actively trigger as soon as any incident begins to happen, including scenarios like a person who is neither a student nor belongs to the faculty or the management is entering the school so that the security can validate if the person has authentic reasons of being inside the school premises, it says.

The company also says that school buses, which have cameras installed, can be powered with this solution to ensure complete child safety during transit. The solution will enable schools in analysing threats in a better way by recognizing expelled students, local substance dealers, people who have posed threat in the past, unusual behavior or any person entering prohibited areas.

Besides security features the solution also supports attendance management of students, teachers & staff and in future will support the ability to analyze classroom behavior through gestures and emotions. Through an intuitive dashboard SchoolProtect provides comprehensive descriptive, predictive & prescriptive analytics.

SchoolProtect “is our little contribution towards making the world better and safer through AI,” Chandurkar said.