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Caught in the act? P-REACT can pick up suspicious behaviour.
Petty criminals had better watch out. A computer vision system has been developed that detects suspicious behaviour in CCTV footage as it happens. The system can then alert CCTV operators to intervene, and save the footage in case it is needed for evidence.
Researchers involved in the
P-REACT project, which is the work of a consortium of European companies and organisations and is partly funded by a grant from the European Commission, say
the surveillance technology could help catch criminals in the act and relieve police of "digital evidence overload" by highlighting video clips most likely to be relevant to investigations.
"
If a camera at a gas station picks up suspicious activity, the video footage will be sent to the cloud, people at the gas station will be alerted, and nearby cameras will be told to look out for the criminals too," says project coordinator Juan Arraiza at Vicomtech, a research foundation in San Sebastian, Spain.
P-REACT tracks people's movements to work out whether they're simply walking along a street, for instance, or doing
something dodgy. Its algorithms have been trained on sample scenes of people fighting, chasing someone or snatching a bag. They had to be finely tuned to identify these activities: hugging can look a lot like fighting, for example, while running can be mistaken for giving chase.
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