New Zealand Police consider upgrading to facial recognition CCTV systems

New Zealand’s police force is considering upgrading their CCTV systems to modern, facial recognition-capable ones, a recent news report in the local media has been able to suggest.

The force are looking to upgrade their surveillance gear to include “advanced facial recognition technology” able to be used through closed-circuit cameras.

With a network of CCTV cameras across the country, it would give criminals fewer places to hide. Also in the high-tech system would be suspects, prisoners, firearms licence details, missing people and those on the child sex offender register.

Police national forensics services manager Inspector John Walker said the new technology would allow “advanced facial recognition technology to assist in the identification of unknown offenders where a facial image is available for comparison – for example through CCTV”.

There was an objective that officers on the beat would be able to get photos directly to their phones, where they could show witnesses a series of images.

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).