You see it on the news. You hear about it on the radio. You read about it in the newspaper or on the internet. The criminal that got away, or the accident that could have been avoided. Normally always followed by the ever present question “What could have been done to prevent this?”
We all know security cameras to offer the best possible evidence to support the innocent and the guilty. What if they were smarter? What if our surveillance systems could actually notify the proper authorities when disaster strikes and possibly save the day? What if? After all, it isn’t very practical to set up a city, like New York or Las Vegas for example, with a huge network of closed-circuit television cameras and have someone monitor thousands of screens.
New technology from Abeo Technical Services called AWARE, short for The Automated Warning and Response Engine, may just answer that “What if?” question. The AWARE system actually does away with the typical array of screens and replaces it with just one view. That view will combine all the images from the cameras and create a picture that will encompass the entirety of the surveillance monitored area. That video is also analyzed in real time for any potential danger or threats that may pop up.
The analysis of the video uses many different aspects to determine threats. Everything from motion detectors, radiation sensors, explosive detectors, etc. to evaluate threat levels. Since there are some actions that could be confused with threats, such as a car being parked illegally, there are other things that AWARE will look for. Say that the car was parked illegally, the camera system would snap an image of the license plate and run it through the License Plate Recognition software , analyze it, and send it away to the appropriate DMV where the plate can be cross checked to see if the vehicle matches the plates. Should the plate not match the vehicle, it would automatically trigger the next level of the security system. Utilizing whatever resources may be available to the system, such as a pan, tilt, and zoom camera, the system will run through its database to determine whether or not the events happening in the footage match those that could be considered for false alarms. Should the system register the event to be threatening, it would then send out alerts to any and all emergency responders to assist with the threat.
Even with all of the fanciness of the new system, could it really take the place of human judgement? After all, any system can be hacked. The creators of the system deem that it has much better threat probability detection than any human, that is, if it is set up properly. Should that be the case, then progression of the system can be expected as well. Better processors and software updates to the system will only guarantee better security camera images and better probability calculations.
This particular system is already being used to some of the newer security camera systems in some cities. We should all expect to see this type of software taking over large network surveillance systems soon
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