Leicestershire police to trial facial recognition technology

An UK police force has announced plans to trial a facial recognition software designed to significantly speed up the process of identifying suspects from images capture by CCTV camera systems.

Leicestershire police will use a computer program to automatically search, process and match facial images held in large digital mugshot databases in order to speed up criminal investigations.

The application takes the captured images and then compare the to the police database, ranking the database images against the new image in order to produce a list of likely candidates.

It’s not the first time police have experimented with facial recognition software. Brazilian police used the technology during the World Cup while Boston police tried to use it to track down the marathon bombing suspect.

CCTV Surveillance is in the position to implement advanced face biometrics solutions that are used to identify personnel and verify their identity from a predefined access control list. Our systems facilitate user management at runtime and allow users to be enrolled on-the-fly by video capture.

The technology yields excellent 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.

The face recognition CCTV systems supplied by CCTV Surveillance also support the creation of Whitelists and Blacklists, as well as easy integration with existing ID management products. The biometric systems support runtime alarm management, highly tunable (control based on time-frames, sequentially, etc), while alarms can be easily exported to common formats (PDF, Excel) and remote devices (mobile, PDA, tablet, security control centre).