Facial recognition CCTV systems to be rolled out across London’s latest upmarket developments

Facial recognition CCTV systems are set to be rolled out across some of London’s latest upmarket developments, including the Kings Cross estate, where Google is planning a major campus and Canary Wharf Group, whose 39-hectare estate hosts major global financial institutions, such as Barclays and Citigroup, a recent news report has been able to suggest.

According to the media report, the surveillance cameras installed across the Kings Cross estate are also used for tracking. “These cameras use a number of detection and tracking methods, including facial recognition, but also have sophisticated systems in place to protect the privacy of the general public,” a spokesman claimed.

However, the developers of the Kings Cross estate did not reveal how many facial recognition cameras they have or details about the “sophisticated systems” that are supposed to protect the privacy of the public.

Canary Wharf group, according to the Financial Times, is also planning to add facial recognition technology to some or all of its 1,750 or so surveillance cameras that already operate around the financial district. It is currently in talks with suppliers for a pilot project in advance of a potential roll-out.

The FT reports ‘sources close to the company’ claiming that the facial recognition system at Canary Wharf would be “limited to specific purposes or threats” and would not target pedestrians and office workers. In addition to CCTV surveillance, Canary Wharf also operates automatic vehicle licence plate recognition on the roads that traverse the estate – automatically notifying police of any vehicles on watch-lists.

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 access control 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).