AI For Smart Crime-Fighting

The Founders

Atul Rai, Anurag Saini, Chetan Rexwal and Pankaj Sharma. Rai holds a master's degree in AI from the University of Manchester and worked abroad as a research associate specialising in machine learning and computer vision. Other three co-founders are engineering graduates. They worked at a Delhi-based tech start-up for a while before starting their venture.

The Pivot

Staqu Technologies started as an AI-powered e-commerce enabler, helping online shoppers track products via image search. The company also worked with Indian smartphone makers and integrated AI functionality with their devices to offer targeted content and advertisements.

The eureka moment came in 2017 when the co-founders realised the huge potential of AI for tracking security threats and preventing crime. Currently, it offers a host of AI solutions to boost policing; 60 per cent of its revenue comes from the security business.

Smart Detection, Step by Step

The team came out with an app called Artificial Intelligence-Based Human Efface Detection to digitise criminal records. The database can be updated and is searchable based on three crucial parameters - image matching, fingerprint matching and speaker identification through language-neutral phonetic search. Staqu abides by LFW2 benchmarking for facial recognition and has attained 99.8 per cent accuracy. The technology is further used for aerial image analyses, making facial composites and identifying missing persons.

Next comes Jarvis, an AI-powered video analytics tool that monitors CCTV footage and sends real-time alerts. The biggest installation took place in UP where the system is managing 3,000 security cameras placed across 70 locations and covering 900 km.

PINE (police intelligence news extractor) is an open-source intelligence technology which searches and deep-dives into media data for better threat perception. "There could be several search filters here to extract the not-so-obvious anomalies from everyday happenings. Once the dots are connected, the bigger picture could be extremely helpful as it involves (crime) hotspot, incident frequency and gang link analyses," explains Rai.

Finally, there are the smart glasses (will work like Google Glass), ideal for VIP events and crowd situations. Staqu is working on the software part of it while the hardware will have a camera and a projector fitted in so that it can capture people's snapshots, run them past the criminal database and get the data displayed in case there is a match.

The Road Ahead

The start-up is eyeing hospitality and education sectors as both require better implementation of safety and security norms. It is also trying to raise a bigger round of growth capital and may work as the technology partner of security firms in South-east Asia, Africa and the West.