Smart cities utilize a number of sensors to observe activities and retrieve data in public spaces across a city, focusing on being more efficient and effective with traffic management, water resources, energy, waste, and law enforcement. Those sensors refer to video surveillance resources and video management software which are useful for relevant city agencies such as transportation, sanitation, planning, and local law enforcement. Due to video surveillance being a primary tool for security, smart cities have installed or expanded an extensive video camera network. Generally, the city’s police department is the first agency to gain access to video camera footage, so they are capable of monitoring cameras in real time, and also conduct forensic review of video footage during post-incident investigations.
Why Video Management Software
Public safety is a key priority in smart cities and police departments are required to resolve investigations swiftly and as accurately as possible. Manually reviewing and analyzing high volumes of video footage can be a tedious, time consuming task and human analysts are seldom capable of effectively comprehending or analyzing the data. Video analytics software focuses on both of those challenges by processing video data and identifying, classifying, and indexing objects within the video footage. This includes trucks, motorcycles, cars, buses, bicycles, children, women, men, as well as animals – making video footage searchable, actionable, and quantifiable.
Despite video analytics software primarily facilitating real-time video surveillance with prompt alerts to boost situational awareness and drive emergency response, the forensic features can be very useful for law enforcement. The software enables police personnel to expedite post-incident investigations by configuring video to promptly review several hours or days’ worth of video footage in a matter of minutes. Implementing searches and combining filters based on relevant and known case details assists police in efficiently and accurately skimming through high volumes of surveillance footage from multiple cameras. These features aid in gathering key evidence and making informed, faster decisions to efficiently locate, identify and apprehend persons of interest.
Appearance Similarity and Face Recognition
Police departments in smart cities consistently use video management software to review street surveillance video footage when searching for a person of interest or a missing person. Police departments can design and manage watchlists of digital images retrieved from video or external sources to conduct face matching within video in jurisdictions where this action is permitted. A video management software can also produce real-time alerts whenever a face match is detected in a live camera view. Face recognition is a vital tool for improving investigations, whether it is post-event or in real time. Police departments can also search video footage based on appearance similarities by applying filters to footage for individuals according to other features such as garments and other attributes where jurisdictions do not allow face recognition.
License Plate Recognition
Another valuable feature that plays an important role to law enforcement is license plate recognition, which identifies registration numbers and license plates in the video. A partial registration number can be just as useful to investigators based on the search, management and alert features available. Partial information can be used to find potential matches, investigate developing situations, and solve cases.
Police departments often have insufficient manpower to investigate every incident reported as fast as they would like to. Smart cities assist police departments solve cases more accurately and efficiently, save valuable time, and possibly avert future crimes, with the combination of video surveillance and video management software. It is a practical way to get added value from CCTV networks, increase police operations, and enhance public safety.