If India and China were to fight a war in the near future, India would face the prospect of losing the war within ten days, says military expert and author Pravin Sawhney in his book 'The Last War: How AI Will Shape India's Final Showdown With China' (Aleph), as reported by IANS. China's war with India will stun the world with the use of artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, multi-domain operations, imaginative war concepts, and collaboration between humans and intelligent robots, Sawhney writes.

The dangers are real, so are we sitting idly? Do we have solid AI-based defence products? Are there any startups working in this domain? With these questions in mind, I got a flashback about one such startup I came across last week at the Digital India Week 2022 in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

Meet Skylark Labs. Founded in 2018, the startup creates advanced AI systems to solve today's far-reaching physical security challenges. We reached out to Dr Amarjot Singh, Founder and CEO of Skylark Labs, to understand its AI-enabled security products and their role in strengthening national security. Amarjot received his doctorate in Artificial Intelligence (Deep Learning) from the University of Cambridge, the UK, in 2018.

The initiation

The motivation behind starting the company was a non-profit, Guria India, that focuses on rescuing trafficked children from brothels in India. We developed an app that uses age-invariant face recognition to trace and rescue missing children. The non-profit uses the app for the same.

Soon after his doctorate, Amarjot joined Stanford University in the USA as a postdoctoral fellow for two years. "I was also a scientist with the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where my work focused on developing their advanced Drone program. After leaving Stanford, Skylark focused on defence products and was primarily motivated by my work with the US defence," said Amarjot.

Products and tech behind

Skylark develops AI-powered security products that provide reconnaissance for operations across the land, sea, and air to foresee emerging Beyond Line-of-Sight (BLOS) threats and proactively avert them. Their security products power ground and air-mounted systems to provide tactical and strategic insights turned into battlefield decisions and actions.

The startup has solutions in the following categories: 

(a) Land-to-Land Systems: Land-mounted cameras which detect threats at

• Land: Emerging Threat Observation System, 
• Air: Aerial Reconnaissance & Elimination System, and 
• Sea: Marine Reconnaissance System.

(b) Land-to-Air Systems: Air-mounted cameras which provide analytics for various applications such as 

• MRTS - Missile Reconnaissance and Tracking System, 
• DROS - Drone Reconnaissance and Observation System, and 
• SCDS - Satellite Change Detection System.

The company's software consumes the video stream from drones or cameras and produces actionable insights for the user. These insights are presented in real-time, which can be used to take necessary decisions. Our dashboard also accumulates these insights over varied periods to provide historical patterns of interest. 

Talking about the differentiator, Amarjot said, "Our proprietary datasets, AI and scalable deployment platforms make us superior to our competition. Our ability to detect critical threats at long distances in the thermal domain gives us a significant edge over our competition in defence applications."

Projects so far

The startup's experience with and interaction with the Indian armed forces is a plus. This positions them well to understand and propose relevant solutions. Some of the key projects the team worked on include:

MEITY's DRISHTI: Skylark Labs was the finalist in the DRISHTI program, a collaborative program between Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) and the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (Meity) focused on acquiring border monitoring and protection systems. The team proposed two systems: 

• PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) camera-based system detects unauthorised vehicles and persons moving through various check posts and vulnerable points.
• UAV/Drone-based AI surveillance that detects suspected vehicles along with geospatial mapping of vulnerable areas across the border. These systems will be tried in the field soon. 

Innovation for Defense Excellence (IDEX): The team is part of the iDEX, the operational framework of the Defence Innovation Organisation (DIO), a special purpose vehicle under the aegis of the Department of Defence Production, Ministry of Defence. They have submitted three proposals, each focusing on the serious problems faced by our armed forces and asking for solutions.

• Ministry of Home Affairs - Monitoring to and fro movement of fishing boats and fishermen at sea: Skylark propose a land-mounted camera solution that can recognise various threats using PTZ and bullet cameras. The solution can identify the threats such as boats landing at unofficial checkpoints, weapons and drugs detection by identifying bulky bags at unofficial checkpoints, and face recognition for fishermen at official checkpoints in real-time.
• Indian Army - Continuous Unmanned Surveillance Tied System for Mechanised Forces: The proposal is for an airborne camera-mounted solution that can recognise various BLOS threats using tethered and untethered moving drones. Two vehicles will be in front of the column to protect the Armoured Column, performing recce and identifying any potential threats to the column from long distances. These threats are identified using tethered drones, which the soldiers in the recce vehicles can put in the air. These tethered drones are to identify any potential threats from long distances. Once a likely threat is identified, untethered drones can take off from the recce vehicles to confirm the threats by flying to the likely threats. 
• Assam Rifles - Seamless and continuous domination of 1843km of Indo-Myanmar Border: The proposed solution can identify the threats, including trespassing at unofficial checkpoints, weapons and drugs detection by identifying bulky bags at unofficial checkpoints and face recognition for residents at official checkpoints in real-time. 

Regarding security establishments, privacy and security are the top priority. Commenting on this aspect, Amarjot said, "We have proprietary encryption algorithms that ensure our client's data are secure. Our solutions are deployed at our client's premises, further confirming the privacy and security of our clients."

It is important to look at how Skylark Labs will go from here. "We are actively engaging with the armed force and appropriate organisations that can help us deploy our solutions with the armed forces. We are also raising our next round of funding to expand our operations and sales," concluded Amarjot.