VAFI Newsletter N°1 - March 2020
The community for Video Analysis for Investigation, or “VAFI Community”, is a platform for dialogue and exchanges between all video investigation experts who can be either LEAs, suppliers, researchers or developers. This newsletter will help sharing the news of interest for the VAFI community by sharing articles, publications, press release on the topic, institutional reports and more.
Besides, we will share with you the results of the VICTORIA project and its upcoming Final Conference taking in the City of Nice, France from 27 April (9h00) to 28 April (15h00) 2020.
For the first release of the newsletter, besides the information on VICTORIA and its upcoming conference, the news are divided in three sections: Scientific papers and patents, Technology Watch and Reports.
We hope you enjoy reading this newsletter. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions or comments you may have about VICTORIA and its VAFI at VICTORIA-arttic@eurtd.com. Your comments and suggestions are always welcome!
Luc Sonke
VICTORIA Project Coordinator
Scientific, academic papers and patents
Visual Analytics for Semi-Automatic 4D Crime Scene Reconstruction
During criminal investigations, every second saved can be valuable to catch a suspect or to prevent further damage. However, sometimes the amount of evidence that needs to be investigated is so large, that it can not be processed fast enough. Especially after incidents in public, the law enforcement agencies receive a lot of video and image material from persons and surveillance cameras. Currently, all these videos are viewed manually and annotated by criminal investigators. The goal of our tool is to make this process faster by allowing the investigators to watch a combination of several videos at the same time and giving them a common spatial and temporal reference. More...
N Weiler, M Kraus, T Kilian, W Jentner, DA Keim - scibib.dbvis.de, 2019 within VICTORIA.
Oct 2019
Generic Object Detection and Tracking for Accelerating Video Analysis within VICTORIA
“…Video recordings have become a major resource for legal investigations after crimes and terrorist acts. However, currently no mature video investigation tools are available and trusted by LEAs. The project VICTORIA addresses this need and aims to deliver a video analysis platform that will accelerate video analysis tasks by a factor of 15 to 100. In this paper, we describe concept and work in progress done by AIT GmbH within the project, focusing on the development of a state-of-the-art tool for generic object detection and ….” More…
SCHREIBER, David, BOYER, Martin, GEMEINER, Peter, et al. Generic Object Detection and Tracking for Accelerating Video Analysis within VICTORIA. In : 2019 International Conference on Speech Technology and Human-Computer Dialogue (SpeD). IEEE, 2019. p. 1-6.
Jan 2019
A Scalable and Composable Analytics Platform for Distributed Wide-Area Tracking
“…Smart cities are a manifestation of the Internet of Things (IoT). The push for smart cities has led to the proliferation of video cameras in public spaces [1]. London is expected to deploy 642,000 cameras by 2020. These cameras will be used primarily for surveillance of the city for urban safety. At the same time, such smart city deployments have also seen edge and fog computing paradigms gain preference over the cloud-only computing model [2]. This is due to the network proximity of the edge and fog devices to the data sources, offering lower latency access to data and lower bandwidth requirements to push high volume data, such as video streams, to the cloud….” More…
KHOCHARE, Aakash et SIMMHAN, Yogesh. A scalable and composable analytics platform for distributed wide-area tracking. In : Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking. ACM, 2019. p. 506-506.
11 December 2018
Large Scale Audio-Visual Video Analytics Platform for Forensic Investigations of Terroristic Attacks
“…To assist law enforcement agencies (LEA) in identifying suspects and securing evidences, we present a platform which fuses information of surveillance cameras and video uploads from eyewitnesses. The platform integrates analytical modules for different input-modalities on a scalable architecture. Videos are analyzed according their acoustic and visual content….” More…
SCHINDLER, Alexander, BOYER, Martin, LINDLEY, Andrew, et al. Large Scale Audio-Visual Video Analytics Platform for Forensic Investigations of Terroristic Attacks. In : International Conference on Multimedia Modeling. Springer, Cham, 2019. p. 106-119.
Technology watch & Press release
Dec 2019 – sourcesecurity.com
NICE Wins Two ‘ASTORS’ Awards for Best Investigation and Best 911 Incident Recording and Analytics Solutions
… NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) announced today that it has won two ‘ASTORS’ Awards for NICE Inform and NICE Investigate... More…
Nov 2019 – sourcesecurity.com
BriefCam announces a mobile application to enhance investigation capabilities on the go
… “By extending BriefCam’s video investigation capabilities deeper into the field, police officers, and public safety personnel can rapidly pinpoint people and objects of interest with speed and precision beyond the confines of their office”….. More…
Oct 2019 - https://siliconcanals.com
10 facial recognition startups from Europe you should know about in 2019
Talking about facial recognition startups, Europe is home to numerous such companies and here we list 10 such companies betting big on this biometric authentication process.. More…
Oct 2019 – securityinfowatch.com
Panasonic takes center stage at IACP 2019 with innovative evidence capture and analytics portfolio
Panasonic Public Safety Solutions Division, a business unit of the newly formed Panasonic i-PRO Sensing Solutions Co., Ltd., is displaying its portfolio of evidence capture, management, and analytics designed specifically for law enforcement applications at IACP. Featured products include: a new compact and lightweight body worn camera (BWC) with first of its class swappable battery for extended use; a powerful Unified Digital Evidence (UDE) platform that allows agencies to easily manage, share, and secure critical evidence and data; and a new Video Redaction AI-Assisted Software that saves time, effort and reduces overhead expenses. More…
Oct 2019 – eu.usatoday.com
Amazon's Ring is 'the Neighborhood Watch of 2020,' police say as doorbell cams proliferate
… Recognizing the growing proliferation of home security cameras – in doorbells, on floodlights and porches and at back doors – many law enforcement agencies are jumping on the latest tech bandwagon to spot possible crime trends, share safety information and request videos from app users in an effort to stave off and solve crimes…. More than 400 law enforcement agencies across the country have joined the app as partners, including about 20 in Michigan – all in the Lower Peninsula – from Kentwood and Kalamazoo to Grand Blanc and St. Clair. More…
Police consider facial recognition in Denmark, Sweden, Romania, but bias concerns persist
Copenhagen police could gain a “huge advantage” in investigations by implementing a biometric facial recognition system. Senior Inspector Jørgen Bergen Skov emphasized the amount of time and human resources that must be allocated to manually reconstruct events from video footage, and that police are only interested in facial recognition technology to investigate criminal cases. More…
REPORT
2019 - IFSEC Global
The video surveillance report 2019
The Video Surveillance Report 2019 examines several paradigm shifts transforming the potential of network cameras and associated hardware and software.
The first four chapters – covering the cloud, facial recognition, AI/deep learning and edge analytics – focus on operational benefits: improvements to security and post-incident investigations, cost-efficiencies and applications beyond detect-and-deter and crime investigations.
The report highlights the huge potential of face recognition. Matching faces in crowded public places against criminal watch lists, face recognition systems give law enforcement and counter-terror agencies powerful new ways to prevent and solve crimes. It can also speed up investigations – a godsend for police forces coping with budget cuts.
Asked which two security-conscious sectors or environments they thought would benefit most from AI, respondents chose crowded places like public squares and shopping centres plus law enforcement applications like murder investigations more than 2.5 times as often as any other option. More on the VAFI …
VICTORIA Final Conference
27-28 April 2020 - Nice, France
Improving Video Analysis for a Safer Europe
During the two-day conference, the VICTORIA consortium will present the project outputs after three years of intense research and development including live demonstration of the VICTORIA Video Analysis Platform (VAP) front of LEAs representatives, LEAs and developers.
Coordinators of related H2020 security projects will have the opportunity to give insights into their project results during a 10-minute talk. The event’s “Exhibition Space”, a dedicated open market session, will offer further networking opportunities, while a dedicated exhibition space and poster session will more specifically showcase VICTORIA’s outputs.
The event is organised in association with the City of Nice, Member of the Project Advisory Board.
More information on the public website at https://www.victoria-project.eu/final-conference/