Trace Target Movements On- and Off-Campus
Sometimes a crime off campus becomes a problem on campus. For campuses in urban environments, some suspects will hide on college property while fleeing the scene of a crime. The right video analytics solution enables safety officers to quickly create a composite – shirt style and color, hat, hair color, and length and color of pants, among other properties – or use a photo or still frame from other footage to identify a person of interest on camera. If a suspect commits a robbery at a nearby convenience store and attempts to hide on campus, a shot of the robber from the store’s camera can be used to quickly scan the system for any sign of that individual.
Once the suspect has been identified, some analytics solutions’ mapping capabilities can retrace his movements across all campus cameras and pinpoint his current or last known location. All images, video and locations associated with the search can be saved or shared among law enforcement agencies for use in investigations and prosecution. If campus security had to go back through recordings manually to visually scan the video for any sign of a suspect matching the description, the suspect would likely be long gone before he was ever identified on camera.
By providing near real-time, actionable information about the location and movements of persons of interest, video analytics solutions that track suspects accelerate response times, enhance investigations, improve campus security and allow healthcare and educational organizations to better assist local law enforcement.
Analytics Can Address Wide Variety of Crimes
Of course college campuses experience more than just lost children, burglars and suspicious individuals. Unfortunately, the students themselves sometimes create situations in which real-time video analytics and knowing where someone is on an accurate map are particularly useful.
There are certain times when crimes are more likely to be committed on campus. For example, if a school wins a national football or basketball championship, there will likely be campus-wide celebrations. When that excitement is taken too far, however, injuries, property damage, assaults and other crimes can occur.
If an assault occurs during a campus celebration, the security team can track the suspect in real time using analytics, seeing that she made her way across the quad and past the dining hall and the library to a dorm. Depending on the type of video analytics solution deployed, the system isn’t limited in the same way as facial recognition, which demands that cameras be carefully positioned. Instead it spots the suspect from both the front and back, and from the angled perspective most video surveillance cameras have.
Knowing the assault suspect’s current location, campus security can then lockdown that dorm and ferret out the suspect. The kind of investigation that used to take hours or days to connect the dots now takes moments and offers campus security greater control over on-campus happenings.
Additionally, all of this can be done with little or no false positive readings.
Rate of False Alarms Has Greatly Declined
It’s hard to find a college campus today that isn’t outfitted with security cameras – they’re a bare minimum security need at this point. But to transform the footage those cameras gather from data to actionable information requires analytics.
Historically video analytics focused on detecting that something suspicious was in motion on one of potentially hundreds of cameras – an intrusion, loitering, over-crowding or an abandoned bag – but its adoption continues to be hampered by a high number of false alarms, which causes the video analy
tics element of many video systems to be deactivated. Fortunately, recent advances in the technology has changed the way we think of video analytics by eliminating most false alarms, yet still answering the vital question of “where is he now?” so first responders can get the situational awareness they so desperately need.
Dr. Bob Banerjee is Senior Director of Training and Development for NICE Systems’ Security Division.
