Smart imagery for speedier investigations

Rapid video investigation cuts the time needed to conduct enquiries, helping investigators to establish correlations and produce hard evidence about who was involved. Developed in collaboration with forensics specialists from the French law enforcement community, the Thales solution enables investigators to do their jobs faster and more efficiently. 

Videoprotection systems generate huge volumes of imagery. When an incident occurs, the ability to exploit this data is critical. But how to sift through hundreds of hours of footage quickly and efficiently in order to identify suspects, reconstruct what happened and establish correlations between people and events?+

Thales has been working with France’s police forensic service (Police Technique et Scientifique) since 2009 to meet this requirement. The No. 1 objective is to save time. Working closely with the police, Thales identified priorities and key functionalities and developed a complete solution around an intuitive, user-friendly interface that helps investigators do their job quickly and efficiently.

Smart corpus

The rapid video investigation system developed by Thales automatically processes all available video feeds from the scene of an incident, irrespective of their source (CCTV cameras at shops and businesses, urban videoprotection cameras, smartphones and other mobile devices, etc.). The system adds an electronic signature to each piece of footage as proof that the data has not been altered in any way. Then it transcodes the data, compares it with data from other sources, adds keywords and other metadata and indexes everything for easy retrieval and correlation.

Once the mass of raw footage has been turned into a smart corpus of video data, investigators can use a quick-select function to choose the relevant sequences. The system lets them search for faces and license plates to locate and identify suspects, reconstruct the routes taken by individuals and vehicles, and extract the evidence needed to prove that suspects were involved. 

Intuitive functionality

The system’s user-friendly interface offers three main functions: 
 

  • A map function, used by investigators to narrow down an area, combine all available video sources for that area selected and identify the most relevant cameras and sensors. This function can also be used to progressively reconstruct the routes taken by individuals and vehicles of interest.
  • The view function is designed to highlight elements of interest (faces, license plates, vehicles, etc.), locate the corresponding video feeds and switch quickly and easily from one area of interest to another.
  • The investigator desktop progressively adds the elements needed to organise the investigation and establish correlations between pieces of video evidence.

The solution is based on an innovative concept developed to meet the specific requirements of public safety agencies, security services, operators of airports, ports, secure installations and other critical infrastructure, and cities with large-scale videoprotection systems. A new version of the solution will be commercially available in 2016. 

Key functions

  • Collects video and data from multiple sources
  • Synchronises multiple video sequences for comparison and viewing
  • Adds metadata (automatically or manually) for indexing
  • Reconstructs routes taken by people and vehicles
  • Extracts evidence from huge volumes of data
  • Constitutes legal evidence with optimal security to ensure integrity and confidentiality
  • Provides judicial authorities and insurance firms with evidence from multiple video sources
  • Collects data in the field using mobile or deployable storage unit 
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