Opinion Piece: Call for police forces to make more intelligent use of CCTV and facial images

20 August 2009

By Stewart Hefferman, CEO 

Huge investment has been made in the CCTV infrastructure in Britain and it now has more cameras than any other European country.

Forces such as the Metropolitan Police have been leading the way in making more intelligent use of both CCTV and still images. However, it has been widely recognised that the potential for such images to be used as valuable intelligence in both major and volume crime investigations has yet to be fully realised.

OmniPerception has been working with forces to help educate them in making more intelligent use of what has the potential to be a powerful evidential tool.

Our background as providers of facial biometrics, video analytics and other advanced image processing and recognition applications, makes us uniquely placed to provide forces with not only advanced technology but our expertise in how to make optimum use of such technology in an evidential context.

At present, we provide two distinct capabilities – the ability to analyse and track objects such as logos in ‘real-time’ and also the ability to use face recognition and surveillance to identify a person through their face.

Despite the fact these are currently two separate disciplines, I see the two becoming more closely aligned so that they can provide police with a single video analytic capability that will either identify objects such as distinctive clothing or logo or faces – depending on the quality of the individual image.

It is recognised that the quality of CCTV is variable and it might be that an officer is analysing a piece of footage where the face is not easily identifiable but other aspects such as a brightly coloured top are more visible. On the other hand it might be that the face is the most distinctive feature.

Having a single technology that is able to assist frontline officers in the identification of a suspect, whether it is by face or other distinctive feature has the ability to revolutionise the effectiveness of images as evidence in crimes.

This is quickly being realised by the majority of forces we work with and it is clear there is an increasing appetite for such technology.

We hope to continue to work with the police and other security and law enforcement organisations to ensure they can make maximum use the technology in future.