City of Perth Briefcam technology to go live before June as part of $1 million Smart Cities trial

Angela PownallThe West Australian
VideoThe cameras can recognize your face and track your movements.

Video surveillance cameras that recognise your face, detect your gender and the colour of your clothes, how fast you're travelling, and then track your movements, will be up and running in Perth by the end of this month.

The City of Perth will switch on the Briefcam technology in new surveillance cameras in East Perth as part of its $1 million Smart Cities trial.

The technology, which also includes heat-mapping, will initially be tested in three of 30 cameras in the new network, and potentially rolled out to more later.

City of Perth commissioner Andrew Hammond said the facial recognition technology would compare the faces of people in live camera footage to photographs supplied by law enforcement officials.

“The facial recognition capabilities will only be activated at the request of relevant law enforcement agencies,” he said.

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Camera IconFacial recognition cameras will be up and running by the end of the month oin East Perth. Credit: Briefcam

The City of Perth will have the ability to move the detection and analytical capabilities between all the cameras in the network.

The Briefcam system uses “deep learning”, when a computer develops neural networks trained to recognise patterns, and “computer vision”, when a computer is trained to interpret and understand the visual world.

The software, which has been developed in Israel, will also allow the city to:

  • be alerted if someone enters a restricted area as defined by borders on the screen.
  • be alerted if an object has been in the same spot for a certain period of time.
  • count pedestrians on footpaths.
  • count vehicles on roads.

The City of Perth is believed to be the only authority - apart from the Border Force’s passport gates at Perth airport - in WA to use facial recognition surveillance on the public.

Camera IconA city command centre in a Huawei laboratory. Credit: Supplied by Huawei

While WA is beginning its journey into the world of artificial intelligence-powered public surveillance, other places are leaps and bounds ahead.

Chinese company Huawei is aggressively investing in the tech race, spending AUD$21.2 billion on research and development last year. The company has not been involved in the City of Perth’s video surveillance trial.

Hong-Eng Koh, Huawei’s global chief of public safety, said facial recognition alone was not enough because people can easily cover their face, so the company was supplying technology that does even more.

“Now we are meeting companies around the world, not just China, but in Europe, US, Israel that have different analytics, what colour you are wearing, how you are walking, what bag you are carrying, or your vehicle,” he said in a briefing in Shenzhen, China last month.

“There are companies that even recognise a car by the windscreen. We can actually recognise the car by the way you deploy your stickers or if you hang a toy.”

Mr Koh said the latest video surveillance analytics can even track suspected criminals to try and prevent offences from happening.

Pierre Perron, a former Canadian Mountie and now Huawei’s global public safety expert, said the latest technology allowed for real-time video to be sent from a crime scene to police as soon as the alarm was raised.

“With 5G and the speed of facial recognition, you could identify people even before you go,” he said.

China has one surveillance camera per 20 citizens while the UK has one camera for every 11 citizens, Mr Koh said.

How it works:

1: The Briefcam system can understand an entire scene and its background.

2: It detects, tracks, extracts and classifies every object or person.

3: Moving objects are separated from the video background, using artificial intelligence, and then tracked.

4: Objects are classified, for example people and vehicles, their attributes e.g. gender, carrying a bag, vehicle model, and saved in a database with their locations.

5: The information in the database can be searched, generate reports and send alerts.

6: The system allows hours of footage to be reviewed in minutes by simultaneously displaying events that have occurred at different times.

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