Growing use of advocacy for facial recognition to identify deceased

India is considering the use of facial recognition to identify deceased persons and unidentified “found persons.”

The proposal was put forward by the country’s Union Home Minister Amit Shah while chairing a review meeting on the implementation of three new criminal laws with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in Delhi.

“He (Shah) said alerts to investigation officers as well as senior officers as per pre-defined timelines will help expedite the investigation process,” said a ministry official, as reported by India’s The Telegraph. “He asserted that biometrics technology should be adopted to identify unidentified bodies and unidentified found persons.”

The meeting reviewed implementation and integration of the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CTTNS) 2.0 and the Inter-Operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS), the New Criminal Laws and the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS), prisons, courts, prosecution and forensics with ICJS 2.0 at all-India level.

India used facial recognition to identify the deceased victims of a train derailment in 2023, and neighboring Pakistan has used face biometrics to notify relatives of dead or incapacitated people in hospitals.

Shah’s advocacy for the use of face biometrics to identify deceased comes as forensic scientists in Europe start using the technology to identify migrants lost at sea.

An estimated 25,000 people have died in the Mediterranean over the past decade but only around 20 percent are ever identified. Migrant Disaster Victim Identification (MDVI) launched an Action to help remedy this. Led by professor Caroline Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University, the initiative pulls experts across Europe to focus on identifying unidentified migrant deaths.

MDVI Action has introduced some innovative approaches, such as the development of handheld 3D scanners to capture detailed images of the deceased before decomposition. Another is using “secondary identifiers” such as facial features, birthmarks, tattoos or piercings. While the only legally recognized methods are DNA, dental records and fingerprints, it could prove valuable to have alternatives when such identifiers aren’t available.

MDVI marks a shift as migrant deaths were historically not handled as disaster victim identification (IDV) cases, which limited resources available for investigations.

In September, Canadian software developer Face Forensics released a face biometric system known as f2 DVI for identifying individuals in cases where faces are severely damaged, such as from trauma or decomposition.

Facial recognition has also been deployed to identify people in conflict zones.

It was revealed in 2022 that the Ukrainian defense ministry was using Clearview to assist in identifying the deceased. At the time, Clearview CEO Ton-That said that Clearview’s facial recognition could identify deceased people more easily than fingerprint biometrics, and would work even if the victims had sustained facial injuries.

Amazon’s facial recognition system Rekognition was used in Israel to locate missing and dead after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel from Gaza.