HotelWatch: A Hotel Identification System to Combat Human Trafficking

According to the International Labor Organization (ILS), approximately 27.6 million people were victims of human exploitation in the year 2021. Trafficker adaptability, victim vulnerability, and technological challenges make it difficult to capture the perpetrators of these heinous crimes. The crime typically occurs in hotel rooms, where traffickers capture images of their victims for use in illegal advertisements and other criminal activities. However, there are several challenges to identifying the hotels from these images, such as poor quality of hotel images and assorted camera angles. Different hotel chains with similar room types can have homogeneity in room designs, leading to low inter-class variation. The existing solutions lack the complexity and efficiency to correctly classify the hotel rooms. Our goal is to develop a comprehensive system that enables law enforcement authorities to curb human trafficking. The proposed solution enables the user to find the top-5 hotels that are most similar to the one in the image drawn from the dark web or ongoing cases. The system aids in tracking, verification, and addition of case-related information to the database. It serves as a human-in-the-loop system by providing a wide set of features like crime stat reports, visualizations, and map views. The end goal of the system is to expedite and streamline the investigation process for human trafficking by catching the perpetrators involved in these heinous crimes and delivering freedom to the victims.