Italian police force deploys facial recognition CCTV systems in an attempt to drive down crime

Italian police has started using a new facial recognition CCTV system that employs a database of over 16 million faces, a recent news report has been able to suggest.

The Facial Recognition CCTV system was introduced last year following an 8-month testing phase and has already helped in the arrests of shoplifters and burglars across the country.

It’s based on a database of 16 million mugshots, nine million of which belong to people who have been identified by the police only once, while the other seven million are of individuals who have been stopped repeatedly.

In an official statement, the State police described the new system as a more advanced interface of AFIS, the automated fingerprint identification system that’s been in use for many years and which contains not only the fingerprints but also mugshots of suspects.

“If before we could describe the physical appearance of a subject, identified by a picture, only by manually entering the written information into our database, now we can enter the picture itself into the system,” forensics department official Fabiola Mancone told national press agency ANSA.

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).