India’s railway catering unit would use artificial intelligence (AI) to assuage top concerns of passengers – hygiene of food.

People have had concerns on hygiene and quality of food, with reports of food poisoning, worms and stale food being served. India’s audit agency — Comptroller and Auditor General — had also flagged these concerns in 2017 stating that food served in trains “at times” was unfit for consumption. It had also noted that low priced bids of contractors were driving them to provide low quality food.

Now giant CCTV cameras and algorithms will be helping Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) police 16 base kitchens to start with. Railways has 200 base kitchens, said an official .

These base kitchens are handled by firms who have license to make and serve food. Many of these vendors have contracts till 2019 to operate these kitchens. “Earlier, these firms were cooking in their own kitchen. Now, they cook in these production centres, developed by the Railways. This allows us a way to track the processes of the vendor,” said an official.

With this module, base kitchens will be monitored pan India, stated a release. The AI module can detect an unexpected change or an event that does not conform to the expected pattern using their machine learning algorithms.

An AI module has been developed by IRCTC to find anomalies in standard operating procedure using CCTV footage. The module has been developed in association with New Delhi based company called WOBOT, said a release.

As of now, 16 base kitchens of IRCTC have been installed with high definition cameras connected to huge monitors for AI vision detection. Live streaming of 16 base kitchens is played all the time, added the release.

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