LocateNow: AI-Driven Public Safety App for Finding and Reporting Missing Persons

LocateNow is an AI-powered public safety system designed to streamline the reporting, identification, and verification of missing and found individuals using facial recognition technology. The platform focuses on improving community-level participation and accelerating the match-identification process by integrating automated face embedding extraction, cosine similarity computation, and structured case management. Users—citizens, volunteers, and authorities—can report missing or found persons, while the system uses deep-learning–based facial representations to compute high-confidence match scores in real time. The application incorporates secure authentication, data validation, and a communication module that enables users to coordinate once a potential match is detected. LocateNow addresses key limitations of conventional missing-person search methods, such as manual verification delays, inconsistent information flow, and lack of digital record-keeping. The proposed system demonstrates promising accuracy, reduced response time, and strong applicability in police departments, NGOs, and emergency response organizations.