Police force cracks the problem of video analysis
The challenge
How can you automatically analyse the hours of video recording involved in a covert surveillance operation quickly while ensuring that no event of interest is missed? For the Principal Technical Support Officer of a large UK police force, the answer was that you couldn’t. Then he met Scyron.
Key benefits
- Set up system within one hour
- Analyse 7 days of tape in two days
- Reduce officer involvement to 2 hours for the entire process
- Eliminate events missed due to operator error
- Ease the process of preparing video evidence for court
With Scyron, the force has been able to find a technical solution to a vital task that used to consume many hours of officer’s time while taking them away from other tasks. The solution allowed the TSU to define the events of interest that they wanted to identify – for example, someone getting into a specific car – and let the system find them automatically. An officer could return and, in a matter of moments, look through a set of trigger frames at the start of each event and decide to either look at the event or delete it.
Apart from reviewing the results, the only other officer involvement was changing the tapes when they had been analysed. Personnel were freed to more productive tasks and the results meant it was easy to produce either video clips or stills for presentation in court.
The result
In these times of squeezed resources, the automatic gathering and building of intelligence now allows for a more effective use of manpower. Apart from the time and cost savings achieved, the force has now secured a number of convictions based on the output from the Scyron solution.
