Innovative surveillance footage archive systems in the fight against crime
Video surveillance forms a large part of criminal investigations, requiring advanced means of both gathering and analysing suitable video evidence. Both aspects of such inquiry are currently fraught with difficulty. With this in mind, the EU-funded ADVISE (Advanced video surveillance archives search engine for security applications) project sought to develop a framework allowing evidence mining from multiple video archives, while also negotiating ethical and legal restraints. The system combines multiple video archives and provides a capability for searching based on location, particular activities, individuals or objects. The project addressed technical and social difficulties. Regarding the former, work began with an analysis of user requirements, translated into system specifications. The resulting architecture provides the flexibility to update and adapt to different applications. It is able to replace modules or add novel and more efficient ones. This platform can also align with national and European data protection legislation updates and the various needs of potential users. To ensure interoperability with external systems and to deal with video format and metadata compatibility issues, the exchanged content and the associated metadata were transformed into a common format. New video archives can be easily added. Project partners considered the legal, ethical and privacy rules that govern surveillance and the resulting content. To this end, they successfully tackled the legal, ethical and privacy constraints that apply to the exchange and handling of surveillance data. In addition, access privileges are adapted to the user and to the sensitivity of particular material. ADVISE's system enables authorised users to access all available videos from a given area, and to search the entire archive for relevant objects or events. Sensitive data not relevant to the investigation are anonymised. The ADVISE technological solution will have a positive effect on actual as well as perceived level of security, lowered economic impact of the fight against crime, and business opportunities for European small and medium-sized enterprises.
Keywords
Crime, video evidence, video archives, video surveillance, security applications
