Facial Recognition CCTV Systems to be Deployed in Malta’s Paceville district, PM confirms

Facial Recognition CCTV systems are set to be deployed in Malta’s Paceville district in a bid to step up law enforcement efforts, a recent news report in the local media has been able to suggest.

Located west of St. Julian’s, Malta, Paceville is the name given to an informal district heavily populated with nightclubs, bars, pubs and restaurants, and is an important nightlife hub on the island.

The plan is to install high-definition CCTV cameras all across Paceville and connect them to a mobile control centre. Facial recognition software will then be used to identify people as they walk in and out of Paceville, and police officers out on the beat will relay data of lawbreakers to the system which would then pick out people’s identities.

“The police are doing a good job but there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done to step up enforcement,” the Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said in an interview “We are looking into safe city concepts to prevent antisocial behaviour, whereby CCTV systems with technology that can identify law-breakers can do away with the need to have police stationed 24/7 in certain areas.”

Despite warnings from the Malta IT Law Association that these systems can have an intrusive effect on privacy, the prime minister has insisted any implementation of this technology will be in full respect of data protection and privacy regulations.

CCTV Surveillance – The experts in deploying Facial Recognition CCTV systems

The Facial Recognition CCTV solution supplied by CCTV Surveillance dynamically compares images of individuals from incoming video streams against those stored in a predefined access control list and immediately sends alerts when a positive match occurs.

The technology yields a very good level of performance despite partial occlusions of the face, the use of glasses, scarves or caps, changes of facial expression, and moderate rotations of the face. Moreover, it does not allow users to be impersonated using photographs.

This biometric technology is the perfect solution to control the access to restricted security areas, especially since we’re talking about a completely automated system that requires very little interaction with the operator.

Our Facial Recognition CCTV system can be easily integrated with existing ID management products and enables administrators to easily create Whitelists/Blacklists for specific areas, while subjects can be very easily enrolled from one or more photographs.

The system fully supports runtime alarm management, is highly tunable (control based on time-frames, sequentially, etc) and even allows alarms to be exported to common formats (PDF, Excel) and remote devices (mobile, PDA, tablet, security control centre).