Their research paper will be presented in Venice on October 28, and has already drawn a lot of international attention

A research paper submitted by two students of National Institute of Technology (NIT) Warangal – G. Meghana Reddy and Devendra Patil – final year B. Tech students has gone viral in the UK, France, Denmark and elsewhere for being a pioneering work towards crime detection.

The paper titled ‘Disguised face identification (DFI) with facial key points using spatial fusion convolutional network’ has been accepted for presentation at the ‘International conference on computer vision workshop (ICCVW) – 2017’ being held on October 28 at Venice, Italy. Speaking to The Hindu, Ms. Meghana Reddy who in her B Tech (ECE) final year said that they had developed an artificial neural network with which it was possible to identify criminals sporting scarf, glasses, mask, beard, cap or a combination of all these. “This network detects the original face within five seconds. We could achieve 70% of accuracy and are still working on the project,” she said.

Mr. Devendra Patil, a final year B. Tech (Mechanical) student said: “We have identified 14 facial key points - 10 around eye region, five each on right and left eye, one on nose and three on lips. The features of the face do not change with masks and so also distance between nose, eyes and forehead.

These two students with their mentors – Amarjot Singh, NIT Warangal alumni, who is currently doing his Ph.D. at Cambridge and S. N. Omkar, research scientist at IISc, Bangalore collected 10 disguises, 25 subjects, eight backgrounds and 2,000 images for their research.

Ms. Meghana said that this was first of its kind application in the world they chanced upon and they need to have more data to achieve greater accuracy. The police and other agencies would be having great data bank of criminals which will help to train the network. When a new image is fed to the computer using this artificial neural network, it would help show the real face of the disguised person. “We have done major part of our research at Innovation Garage on NIT Warangal campus,” she explained.

The research paper would be presented on behalf of the students by Amarjot Singh who is also the co-author and one of the mentors at Italy in October.

NIT Warangal Director G.R.C. Reddy urged students to come forward with innovative ideas and the institute would fund for research activities. Dean, Planning & Development, K.V. Jayakumar said the students did the institute proud by their pioneering work which was featured in international media.