The London Police’s Secret Weapon

The London Police’s Secret Weapon

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The Central Image Team of the London Metropolitan Police has been involved in testing a technology to speed up the processing of data and video footage in criminal investigations.

The key element of the system is the processing capacity of a supercomputer. It is combined with intelligent software and graphics processors to analyse video footage. The company behind the development, SeeQuestor, claims it makes it possible to index 24 hours of video footage in as little as 15 minutes.

The company said the Met Police and British Transport Police have been among those providing input to the design and running test cases. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, head of the Met’s Image Team, suggested the system could make a significant difference in searching through heavy volumes of video footage.

According to ukauthority.com, the SeeQuestor system makes it possible for forensic teams to import thousands of hours of video, converted to MPEG4 H.264 format, and filter out unnecessary footage so that most likely to provide evidence can be analysed. It uses features including person recognition, face detection, attribute search, geo location information and a motion detection filter.

“A system that will automate this and quickly scan the footage, may give us the links and major leads to focus on. Anything that makes man and machine work together in perfect harmony to get us to identify more criminals and find more victims would be a wonderful tool for the police.”