The continuous evolution of serious and organised crime and terrorism poses a challenge for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) that need to provide effective countermeasure solutions for the detection, prediction, investigation, and ultimately prevention of such activities. In particular, the challenges for LEAs are to: (a) effectively correlate data from multiple heterogeneous sources during all stages (intelligence gathering, surveillance, operation, and investigation) of the process; (b) enable efficient access to the multimodal information pertinent to the different stakeholders involved; (c) efficiently simulate in 3D sites of interest in an accurate and visually convincing manner so as to facilitate operational and tactical planning and/or assist investigation; and (d) support the path-to-court of digital evidence.
CONNEXIONs aims to equip LEAs with an interconnected suite of advanced next-generation technologies for significantly improving their capabilities to gather intelligence, analyse evidence, and investigate crime and terrorism effectively and efficiently, with particular focus on improving the capabilities of officers across the board by encompassing the entire lifecycle of law enforcement operations, including: (a) pre-occurrence crime prediction and prevention; (b) during-occurrence LEA operations; and (c) post-occurrence investigation, and crime-scene simulation and 3D reconstruction.
To this end, CONNEXIONs builds upon two main concepts: (1) the multidimensional integration and correlation of heterogeneous multimodal data, including Web and social media multilingual and multimedia content, data acquired by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, police reports, and digital evidence, and (2) the delivery of pertinent information to various stakeholders in an interactive manner tailored to their needs, including through immersive (augmented reality - AR and virtual reality - VR) environments.
The main CONNEXIONs results include: (1) Multimodal information extraction, understanding, integration, correlation, retrieval, and delivery services; (2) Immersive environments for improving situational awareness, investigation, and training capabilities; (3) Operation Command Centre for real-time management of LEA operations; and (4) Integrated platform based on ethics and privacy by-design principles, implementing EU legal requirements, whilst being highly customisable to local legislation.
The developed CONNEXIONs tools and solutions have been validated by the end users in field demonstrations in three operational pilot use cases: (1) counter-terrorism security in large scale public events; (2) human trafficking investigations and mitigation, and (3) crime investigation and training through 3D scene reconstruction.
