Moscow police will get glasses with face recognition

Photo: Svetlana Holyavchuk / Interpress / TASS

Moscow City Hall, namely the Department of Information Technology plans to order the development of augmented reality glasses with the function of face recognition. Devices of this type will be ordered for the police of the capital, so that law enforcement officers can quickly detect the wanted ones. Face recognition algorithms are already being tested using video surveillance cameras.

“DIT is testing the use of facial recognition technology with the transfer of information on augmented reality glasses,” RBC sources said , adding that it is too early to talk about the details of the project, not to mention its results.

The Information Technology Department of the Moscow City Hall regularly conducts pilot projects and research in the field of video analytics and incident response technologies. Within such projects, technologies of various manufacturers are being tested.

The augmented reality glasses that are created for the Moscow police will use technologies from Ntechlab - it has become famous thanks to the FindFace service. The glasses themselves are not a concept; their prototype was shown at the industry forum Security Technologies, which was held from February 12 to February 14 in Moscow. True, the hardware platform is not domestic - software for face recognition was installed on glasses made by the Japanese company Epson. The OS used here is the Android OS.

The product presentation will be held in October 2019 during the Interpolitex exhibition.

Representatives of law enforcement agencies, the head of the city video surveillance department of the Moscow DIT Department Dmitry Golovin and the deputy head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow Alexander Polovinka also talked about the work of a pilot project on the use of face recognition technology in the city video surveillance system. Now, face recognition algorithms are not used everywhere, but only for video from 1.5 thousand cameras. They are connected to police databases of wanted persons of operational interest for law enforcement.

Already 167 thousand cameras are connected to the Unified Data Storage and Processing Center (without the analysis mentioned above), of which about 100 thousand are installed at the entrances and 20 thousand - in the courtyards of residential buildings. The cameras have access to 16,000 officials, including law enforcement officers and city services. In the future, an overwhelming number of video surveillance systems will be connected to the face recognition system.

The system was tested for the first time during the 2018 World Cup. After its introduction into service, the system helped to uncover hundreds of crimes a year, including murder and other grave and especially grave crimes.

Moscow police formed an operational-analytical department, which specializes in working with the city video surveillance system. Thanks to the work of the department, in particular, it was possible to establish the identity and location of the thief of the painting by Arkhip Kuindzhi from the Tretyakov Gallery.

Moscow's video surveillance system includes cameras that are installed in the courtyards, at the entrances of houses, in parks, schools, clinics, shops and construction sites, as well as in the premises of various buildings. “It is built according to the service model: the city does not bear the initial investment costs for the purchase and installation of cameras and the creation of the required network infrastructure, and only pays for video transmission services with the required characteristics to the Unified Data Storage and Processing Center,” said the DIT.

Russia is not the first country where glasses with video surveillance for law enforcement are tested. A large-scale project to catch criminals using modern technologies is being tested in China. Last year, the Chinese police issued special glasses with video cameras that are connected to the facial recognition system.



Gadgets were received by traffic police officers working at a very busy railway station East Zhengzhou. At such stations, staff in a short time can inspect a large number of passing passengers. From this station passes daily from 70 thousand to 120 thousand passengers.

Just a few days after the start of the experiment, the police managed to immediately identify seven people accused of crimes of varying severity, including hiding from the scene of an accident and human trafficking. By 2020, Chinese authorities are planning to increase the number of outdoor security cameras - from the current 170 million to 400 million. Smart glasses are also likely to receive more and more law enforcement officers in that country.