Draft27-12

IS NOW
Combining thermal security cameras with video management systems.
www.flir.com
Untitled-20 1 18/02/16 10:18
Pictured: On
street CCTV,
Bristol city centre
predictions for video:
Dial for the
future
Higher resolution cameras;
more analytics; surveillance
cameras are changing, getting
smaller and cheaper, all the time. But
what new deployments and scenarios
might they make possible? A speaker
tackled that at a recent Surveillance
Camera Commissioner conference.
Pictured left:
construction site
CCTV; and right,
it’s not global
warming come
early to the UK,
but public space
CCTV and palm
tree on Southend
front
Photos by Mark
Rowe
58
Like on TV?
That speaker looking at what video
surveillance trends are ahead was
Dr Neil Cohen of the Home Office’s
Centre for Applied Science and
Technology (CAST). He began with
how video cameras are a commodity
now: body worn, drones, and ‘lots
of things connected to lots of other
things’. Self-driving cars, for instance,
may well require cameras. Where
would their data go? To a BBC TV-
Spooks-like centre, dialling in, to
focus on any face in the country (‘not
as easy as it sounds’, he said). But, as
he admitted, that is becoming more
feasible, with implications for what the
public think of it.
All the data
Cameras are getting, in a word, better.
We already have multi-megapixels;
360 degree field of view; and better
compression. But, he added, for good
images in ‘non-ideal’ conditions you
need to consider colour rendition;
lens distortion; and, looking ahead, an
increase in the range of wavelengths
that some cameras will use, beyond
the human spectrum; he gave an
example of detection at airports, or
maybe more humdrum uses. All very
well, having megapixels, but what to
do with all the data collected? As for
analytics, which may be plugged into
or embedded in the cameras, it’s to
do something with the image - with
or without a reference database - such
as flag suspicious activity, or track
customer flow. The most successful
example of video data analytics, he
said, was automatic number plate
recognition, originally developed, he
pointed out, by CAST (called another
DECEMBER 2017 PROFESSIONAL SECURITY
name) in the 1970s. Some research
questions outstanding he listed as how
to improve recognition of non-UK
plates, and can you obtain data about
the colour and type of a vehicle, from
the image? One for the future, he
suggested, was that the car-maker and
your insurer may be tracking you, and
if you are in an accident, your car will
automatically call an ambulance (and
if you’ve been speeding, the insurance
company might not pay out).
Real world
Other analytics aired by Dr Cohen
were faces; tattoos; and gait. If
automatic facial recognition is so
good, why isn’t it seen more often?
he asked. “The deployments we have
tended to see thus far have been
relatively limited in terms of scale
and what they seek to achieve.” That
said, the algorithms are good enough
to be used in the real world; and
examples he gave were by police, at
the Champions League final in Cardiff
in the spring, and the Notting Hill
Carnival. Image quality is critical, he
pointed out, not only in the faces you
gather on the day, but those reference
images on your ‘watch list’.
Facial recognition
What happens when those better
quality cameras become routine?
More wide use of facial recognition,
he suggested. Could you detect
people’s gender, even sexual
orientation? There are still caveats,
that he listed: variable light in the
street, people in different directions,
veils, ‘spoof’ faces of mask-wearers.
High processing power is needed
for those cameras, although he said
that’s becoming less of a problem;
and someone still has to do something
useful with all that information
being collected. If you’re trying to
detect particular behaviour, you may
still need an old-fashioned human
operator to respond to an alert. What
about machine learning or artificial
intelligence - the software learning
from scenes what's normal and not,
and alerting the operator to events?
Potentially very interesting, Dr Cohen
said, but again he saw caveats on the
operational side; ‘you don’t want too
many false alerts, otherwise you lose
faith in the system’.
Connected
And cameras are not isolated; but
are connected to other senors; and if
data is stored in the cloud, as systems
become more connected they may
be vulnerable (to cyber attack, as
featured by another speaker at the
event, the consultant and trainer Mike
Gillespie, as indeed he wrote last
issue). The implications for police,
as end users of video, may be that
instead of an officer retrieving footage
from a shop, a request is made to a
cloud storage provider (if you know
who it is, and if they’ll talk). And in
local government, the potential is for
far larger control rooms, managing
a larger range of data. If he had a
theme, it was that sheer volume of
data; that needs collecting, sifting
and managing, to be fit for purpose.
He summed up: “There’s a lot of
interesting technology around, but it
always comes with a caveat; you have
the old-fashioned issues of installing
it properly, understanding what you
have got, putting the cameras in the
right place, paying for it. Technology
is always good, but if you have no
budget, that is a challenge in itself.” p
www.professionalsecurity.co.uk
p58 Networks 27-12.indd 1 18/11/2017 12:02