The Railways has scrapped a tender for thermal cameras after receiving feedback from vendors that specifications mentioned for the procurement of the equipment may have favored a Chinese company.
Earlier, the Indian Railways had called for tenders to purchase around 800 such camera systems. It initially did not include black body detection as a specification but has now issued a corrigendum to include it. These were to measure body temperatures of individuals and even detect whether a person is wearing a mask or not.
Railways’ telecom arm Railtel Corp of India Ltd (RCIL) in June, sought expressions of interest (EOI) for artificial intelligence (AI) based surveillance cameras. These can detect elevated body temperatures of people and can be used to screen people.
Railtel has decided to issue a fresh tender with modified specifications. “EOI for selection of partner for thermal temperature screening solution to RCIL’s customers stands canceled with immediate effect. Fresh EOI will be published soon,” a notice by the state-owned company said.
The specifications for the cameras include temperature screening with facial recognition and mask detection, simultaneous temperature screening for multiple persons, detecting whether people wear masks and timely giving alarms on people without masks, identity verification, and stranger alarm.
“Special interface in DeepinMind NVR visually displaying all kinds of information, supporting voice broadcast upon mask and temperature status. Fast video search of target people such as people with abnormal temperatures, without masks, and so on. Exporting reports with ID skin- surface temperature and mask status,” the revised tender document stated.
Based on deep learning technology, Hikvision AcuSense NVRs are able to analyze and classify human and vehicle targets from video streams, as well as to enable efficient video searching by the target type.
This move comes at a time when the Indian government has banned 59 Chinese apps (or apps with Chinese links), citing data security and privacy issues. The ban comes against the backdrop of escalating tension between India and China.
In a letter written to Railtel, one of the vendors said the pre-qualification criteria laid down has some anomalies and ambiguities. Hindustan Times has seen a copy of the letter.
“ Specifications issued are biased to Chinese OEM i.e. Hikvision, Specs clearly mentioned DeepinMind technology which is a proprietary feature of Hikvision NVRs,” the letter said. OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer and NCR for network video recorders. DeepinMind is Hikvision’s proprietary AI technology. The name is a rip-off of DeepMind, an AI pioneer currently owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc.
