UK Home Secretary backs use of facial recognition CCTV cameras

The UK Home Secretary, Sajid David, has backed the use of facial recognition CCTV cameras to identify suspects in public spaces, a news report has been able to suggest.

Police facial recognition cameras have been trialled at events such as football matches, festivals and parades. High-definition cameras detect faces and compare them with existing police photographs, such as mugshots from previous arrests.

But the technology has been criticised for being too inaccurate, particularly when identifying black and ethnic minority people. Civil rights campaigners have also criticised the fact there is no specific regulation governing how police use the software or manage the data gathered.

Speaking at the launch of new computer technology aimed at helping police fight against online child abuse, Mr Javid said it was right for forces to “be on top of the latest technology”.

“I back the police in looking at technology and trialling it and… different types of facial recognition technology is being trialled especially by the Met at the moment and I think it’s right they look at that,” he said.

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).