VANGUARD aims to strengthen the fight against trafficking in human beings (THB) at the nexus of advanced technological solutions, understanding, awareness raising, and training in order to disrupt the trafficking chain at an early stage and address the culture of impunity, with particular focus on THB for purposes of sexual exploitation, labour exploitation, and forced criminality.
VANGUARD develops a set of tools for detecting, identifying, investigating, and preventing online-facilitated THB activities and THB-related activities at (border) checkpoints based on the analysis of online multimedia content and multimodal streams, by leveraging the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
VANGUARD also addresses the societal dimensions of THB through improved understanding and engagement with relevant actors, improved strategies of international cooperation, increased awareness, and better evidence-based policymaking. The capacity of end users (including Police and Border Guard Authorities) will be further enhanced and will enable them to tackle such criminal activities in an effective manner based on advanced tools and solutions and on innovative training curricula.
The Computer Vision Team of BDS R&D will develop AI-based trustworthy and innovative tools to enable the understanding of multimedia content; visual analytics tools to identify and extract useful insights from videos and images captured in the operational framework of the project use cases: online-facilitated THB activities and THB activities at (border) checkpoints. Specifically, the team will develop a tool for human detection and re-identification to analyse the video stream data of airport surveillance cameras and a tool to detect and recognize tattoos and birthmarks in online material, published for the purpose of sexual or labour exploitation. Furthermore, the computer vision team will build tools to detect bias in AI-based models and datasets to contribute to the delivery of AI-based trustworthy solutions.
