Hotels near Delhi Airport asked to install facial recognition software

Hotels located near Delhi Airport would be required to install facial recognition software, according to a report by The Economic Times. The move comes as part of the drive by Delhi police to tighten security in the capital.

Hoteliers at Aerocity has had to face significant delays and incur substantial costs due to the technology.

Lemon Tree Hotels, a mid-market hotel operator, had already installed NEC's facial recognition software in its Aerocity property.

The report quoted Rahul Pandit, president and executive director at Lemon Tree Hotels, as saying that the NEC Face Recognition Solution had been put in place at the hotel. With this, he said, security agencies would be giving the hotel a black-list and the hotel would also be creating a 'white-list' whereby the hotel would be able to recognise its regular guests. He added, the hotel's guests would be happy with this as they would be entering a more secure place.

Despite the positive feedback, many other hoteliers and industry consultants believe that recognition software was an unnecessary expense. The cost of the software and additional cameras needed to capture visitors' facial features amounted to a few crores of rupees for installation and maintenance.

Meanwhile, in a related development, PTI reported that tech firm NEC had completed the deployment of a face recognition solution (FRS) at Lemon Tree hotel in New Delhi, adding an extra layer of security.

No financial details were, however, disclosed. The solution, deployed with NEC's partner Target Vision, matched faces appearing on the hotel surveillance cameras to a database list of potential security threats provided by local authorities.

The first such deployment in the hospitality sector in India, the solution could also be utilised for whitelist management, offering customised service to VIP guests at the hotel simply with the recognition of their faces.

"We are excited to bring NEC face recognition technology to the hospitality sector in India through Lemon Tree Hotels. We have spent 30 years to bring in the level of advancement seen in this technology, which has been globally recognised for its performance and accuracy," NEC India MD, Koichiro Koide told reporters in New Delhi.

The security technology can work with poor quality, highly compressed surveillance videos and images and produce the highest search results per second. The FRS linked to a massive database of over 1.6 million records can produce search results quickly.