IIT students to help Indian Army in predicting ‘Stone Pelters’ in J&K

For a long time now, Indian Army has been facing some tough times with stone pelters in Jammu & Kashmir. Now, they don’t have to struggle anymore- a big thanks to a team of IIT students from Madras. They very well know that the situation in J&K and they decided to do something about it. To help the Indian army, a team of IITians has come up with an idea of using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect crowd behaviour.

This interesting concept first came to light during the Army Technology Seminar-2019 in Delhi, an initiative by the Army Design Bureau to link up with the army and the private sector for meeting the force’s requirements. It has been said that four IIT students presented how crowd analysis could be used in the widespread situations in the J&K region, where stone pelters target to distract the army personnel from doing their operations.

Credits: India TV

“Using action recognition algorithms, crowd density maps and analysis of live images coming in from CCTV cameras, it is possible to predict abnormal events including stone pelting. We think it could help the Indian Army that faces such attacks regularly in J&K,” explained S Raghav Vaidyanathan (student executive head – Centre for Innovation, IIT-Madras) to an HT correspondent.

Former army vice-chief Lieutenant General AS Lamba (retd) added: innovative solutions like AI-assisted prediction of crowd behaviour could experiment in J&K during a difficult situation. “Such innovations could lead to a good solution in the long term.”

While the solution to the difficult problem looks promising and pleasing at the same time, it can help the army take the next big step to put all the chaos once and for all. However, its firm conclusion will have to be tested before the Indian Army can actually execute into their system. For trial and test, a team of army officers is likely to visit Chennai very soon.

Hailing from Chennai, Chaithanya G is the Managing Director of TheYouth. He has dedicated his whole life to reading and writing.