BRIEFCAM Video Content Analytics has been upgraded at the City of Ipswich Safe City control room in Queensland, further assisting security operators and Queensland Police to reduce time-to-target in investigations.
“BriefCam’s technology allows us to do fast reviews and provide intelligence to police, so they can further their investigations and operations,” said Larry Waite, Ipswich Safe City and corporate security manager.
Having recently upgraded to a newer version of BriefCam, the city and police are very excited about the new capabilities for making investigation time even quicker, Waite said.
“What would normally take an hour and a half to 2 hours to review, now takes about 5 minutes. Long term, the more we use it, the more efficient our time is going to be.”
And while there are legal restrictions regulating the use of face recognition, the city is eager to leverage this capability to accelerate finding missing children. By simply adding an image of the missing child, the city can run a quick search, isolate potential matches in video, and recover the missing child.
Briefcam works by aggregating video data over time to help users uncover trends and patterns for driving operational efficiency, visualizing the information as data analytics dashboards. Briefcam analyzes video to detect, track, extract and identify people and objects that appear, driving security enablement and operational decision making.
First implemented by the city in 2014, BriefCam’s Video Content Analytics platform has enabled the city to become smarter, supporting law enforcement, optimizing municipal operations and transforming the city’s video into actionable intelligence for the benefit of the city council, residents and business owners.
Integrated directly into the city’s Genetec VMS, BriefCam was able to provide immediate value to the City of Ipswich. Initially, the technology was used to effectively and efficiently locate missing children at a large swimming lagoon. Operators used BriefCam’s video analytics to accelerate searches, enabling them to filter video objects based on attributes, such as clothing colour, and reunite missing children with their families.
After the initial implementation of Briefcam, the city quickly realized that this technology would have other powerful uses and began using the same search functions to locate stolen vehicles, filtering objects based on vehicle descriptions to quickly isolate targets and provide critical intelligence to the police.
“BriefCam’s intuitive technology allows us to do fast reviews and provide intelligence to police, so they can further their investigations and operations,” Waite said.
Beyond criminal investigations and emergency response, the City of Ipswich increasingly relies on BriefCam to streamline municipal activities. When planning local events, the city leverages BriefCam for traffic optimization in the affected areas. Understanding usual traffic volumes and considering how the expected crowd will impact the overall traffic in the area, the city can predictively prepare for increased crowding on event day. The city uses this information to proactively issue parking permits ahead of mass events to prevent congestion.
The city also plans to start using BriefCam for investigating cases where there is a known suspect or – in the case of a stolen vehicle – a specific object that can be identified. In these cases, the city plans to configure alerts to be notified when people or object matches are detected on pathways monitored by video. BriefCam’s alerting system will enable operators to immediately assess and confirm the match, so that responders can be deployed immediately to apprehend the suspect or recover the stolen property.
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