Our current results made us believe that the project offers promising potential and commercial viability. Our current results (0.8% in FAR and 8.7% in FRR) were presented to our reference customer (ELTODO Group) and we received positive feedback regarding our further cooperation. They see viability of the project mainly from the perspective of CCTV systems maintainer in Prague so better results in FAR and FRR parameters were requested. Target was defined as <1% for both attributes proved on 2000 samples taken outdoors. We are fully convinced that this target is achievable in a perspective of 2 years.
As this is quite far in the future we defined less strict criteria as first milestone on our path, which would be acceptable for business sector, where precision of human recognition is not so sensitive. For this milestone we defined FAR and FRR at the level of <5% (proved again on 2000 samples). This target is realistic in one year.
The most important obstacle to achieve is the issue with separating human silhouette from the background and recognizing Features. This shall be our primary focus for upcoming months.
We have also several other ideas about improving the method and increasing system reliability. We are planning to test those and check if they can improve quality of our results with less demand on computer performance and time needed for analysis.
We are convinced (and we have an endorsement on this from ELTODO Group and Professor Jiří Straus - distinguished expert in criminalistics and forensic biomechanics) that if we manage to reach our targets in system reliability, we shall have great tool for both government and business sector.
Governmental sector can benefit from the proposed solution in the following domains:
• Police: Many times police have high quality records of suspects that are hiding their face. Our system can help recognize such people and trace them as they move in front of cameras. Going further to the future, if a suspect has a record of unique walk pattern in the police database, he/she can be recognized while the system processes video from this new case.
• Customs office: People that committed crime in the past can be recognized at the airports and special attention can be put to them, regardless if they changed their name, outfit or passport.
• Military: The system can be used for protection of restrictive areas as a supplement to authentication systems.
In the business sector, the use can be expected everywhere where recognition of people is important from the security or from client service perspective. We have already started the mapping of the situation in the Czech Republic, together with Antonín Hamřík – a consultant for larger companies and business expert in the field of information technology applications. There is a reasonable and still growing number of cameras (about 30,000 in 2015) and where we intend to acquire our first reference customers:
• Banking sector: There are about 45 different banks with more than 2300 branch offices that can find value in the early recognition of visitors entering the branch.
• Shopping centres: There are 139 big centres and most of them have their own security department. Promising category of customers are also supermarkets (around 700).
• Gas stations: There are more than 3,648 public gas stations, most of which have cameras.
• Any restricted or guarded areas: There are around 830,000 of them, from which 90% are too small for camera installations. Around 20,000 guarded parking lots can be considered as our target. These are parking areas where guards can receive an early warning about return of previously misbehaving people.
Numbers and facts discovered on Czech market will be compared with European markets and used for forming the expansion strategy in the future. More details will be provided in Final report document.
