For the past 4 years I am working in Security line of business and work with cameras, artificial intelligent applications, etc.
People spent a lot of money in CCTV Surveillance systems and most of them think that, as far as security is concenred, they have already done! But in my opinion, its a passive kind of system. if the control room guys are not doing deligent work, I think there is no benefit the origanization is going to get from that investment. Secondly, you cannot store the data for over say one or two months, because of the storage limitations. So, if you want to diagnose an issue after a quarter or so, I don't think any CCTV solution can give any clue to you.
Wherein, by scaling the same CCTV system with a Face Recognition Server, you can do wonders. In my opinion, the investment will be a few lacs, but the outcome is really appreciable.
How you do that? You have to have just another PC based server for Facial Recognition solution (FRS). Give the CCTV video inputs to FRS system. FRS system is capable to identify the face images from the video streams and it can store it in a proper RDBMS as facial templates. This data can be used for any forensic purpose at a later date. This way you can store the images of all the persons appeared in front of your system for say any number of years and it needs very limited storage space. Since the image can be stored in a professional database with date and time stamp, this data can be queried as per your requirement.
Suppose you have another Suspect database of people who you never wanted as a visitor to your factory or office or shop, the same FRS system can scan the live face and match with the existing suspect databse and throw the similarity level to your security personnel by SMS alerts or system pop-up in control room, you can take further ocurse of action as the case may be. This way you can prevent an unwanted event for you yourself.
Another extension of the same system can give you Face Counts, Gender Detection, etc. this also can be a really a valuable information for you to do some research on your visitors, especially if you are from marketing research or a simple shop owners who want to know his customers.
Similarly, there are many applications that are today available which can really change the way you think on security. We can discuss about this topic more in my future articles. Any one interested to know more on this technology and the scope, please write to me at joson@inttelix.com.
