CCTV – The future of automated surveillance.

The UK is one of the most surveilled nations in the globe. An expected 5.9 million CCTV cameras keep watch over everything, but the volume of footage creates an issue: when the police or security services need to actually analyze it, things move very slowly. Despite the proliferation of CCTV, technology for handling the petabytes of data collected is still little more than human eyeballs and lots of patience.

That might be about to evolve. New technology could enable police and security services to quickly analyse CCTV footage to look for movement, faces and track suspects across the world. By linking 'dumb' CCTV cameras to a 'smart' online system, authorities will soon be able to find and track anyone. Not only in UK, but CCTV companies in Abu Dhabi are also working on the something.

CCTV analysis primarily relies on teams of specially trained officers watching thousands of hours of footage, waiting for that one crucial second of evidence. It is a mess of more than a thousand video formats, poor quality footage and manual dispensation. The system is at breaking point, but rather than investing in new technology, police forces have just trained more officers to eyeball footage.

Current video analysis techniques are poor, relying on expensive, specially-installed cameras to make things like facial recognition and person tracking possible. The leading CCTV companies in Abu Dhabi have sold CCTV analysis systems for years, but many claim its technology is different as it works with any footage from any camera, rather than relying on specialist hardware. The challenge is the source of the footage. If a crime happens in London, or wherever, there's absolutely no guarantee for the quality of the footage and the types of cameras that are being used to generate that footage. Whether those cameras are calibrated is also highly unlikely.

It starts with a simple task -- converting any footage into MPEG4. Even this basic service could make a big difference -- police currently struggle with more than 1,000 video formats from the millions of CCTV cameras across the UK.

Once converted, the footage can be analyzed. Latest software can pick out faces in crowds, detect movement and track suspects or missing persons across the world. All it needs is the basic footage from any 'dumb' camera. The company claims its system can analyze footage for faces and movement up to 12 times quicker than a human.

Having analyzed the footage the software creates a timeline with every second of motion it has detected before splitting it into two categories: high probability (right in front of the camera) and low probability (further away in the field of view). An officer can then skip through all the sections where motion was detected.

Any changes or notes added to CCTV footage by the system are carefully audited and saved in a "black box", providing a trail that Addison claims will ensure evidence gathered stands up in court.

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Created on Aug 14th 2018 00:45. Viewed 415 times.

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