Midlands Police
Midlands Police force crack the problem of videotape analysis. (Retro)
The Principal Technical Support Officer and head of a major midlands police force TSU, is a man not used to saying no. With a wealth of personal technical expertise and a highly skilled team to support him, he can almost always meet the needs and requirements of his police colleagues at the operational sharp end.
So it was disappointing for him to be unable to help in one particular area. An area which took up a disproportionate amount of time and effort of the policemen involved in covert surveillance. Covert surveillance produces a vast number of videotapes, all of which have to be watched in order to look for particular types of event. Perhaps it is a person coming or going through a front door or someone getting into a specific car. Whatever the event, it may only happen once or twice during a three-hour tape. Nevertheless, it is a vital piece of evidence or intelligence.
The problem, of course, is that every three-hour tape has to be watched for three hours just to find what is often a very short event. As every policeman knows this is not only time consuming but also incredibly boring which means that concentration is hard to sustain and key events can easily be missed.
Thus it was that the head of the TSU was increasingly asked if he had a technical solution to the problem of finding an event on a videotape automatically. Until recently he could only sympathise and reply that no such solution existed. Then he met a company called Scyron from Birmingham who asked him to trial a software product called Protrax RETRO. Not only did this product claim to do precisely what he wanted but it also appeared at first sight to be very easy to use.
After some fairly hard scrutiny and testing within the TSU, he initially offered the facility to policemen involved in high profile intelligence surveillance work. In his own words, they “Bit my hand off”
The results were impressive. Generally it took around one hour to set the system up in conjunction with the policeman who had obtained the tapes. This involved simply defining the event or events being sought. Then a full seven days worth of tapes could be analysed in two days. The most important thing though was that it would be done automatically. The only operator intervention required during those two days was changing the tapes as they ran out. In the meantime, everyone involved was doing far more productive work. Having found the events, the system would re-record them, together with some pre and post event frames to the hard disk of a standard PC. Importantly, it never missed a real event and it rarely, if ever, recorded a false one.
At the end of the analysis the policeman would return and in a matter of moments look through a set of trigger frames at the start of each event and decide to either look at the event and keep it or delete it if it was of no interest. Total involvement of the policeman was certainly less than two hours to find all the relevant events from a seven-day surveillance.
Having isolated the events it was very easy to produce either video clips or stills for presentation in court. The police force in question have now secured a number of convictions based on the output of Protrax RETRO.
The man in charge of the TSU is clear about the benefits of the product. He says that in the gathering and building of intelligence it allows more effective use of manpower. In these times of squeezed resources that’s a real plus point. Now he has a different problem. He has to allocate his one copy of Protrax RETRO carefully. As he says wistfully “If I tell everybody about it, they are all going to want it!” Perhaps that’s a better problem to have.
