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-<strong>12</strong>.indd 1 18/11/2017 <strong>12</strong>:02
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