BriefCam Bytes: Fast Track
Harnessing the Power of Geolocation for Accelerated Investigations
The release of 2023 M1 this spring was a big deal for BriefCam as it not only debuted new cutting-edge innovation, like Custom ClassifID, but because it also laid the groundwork for faster, easier innovative growth with the power of the Linux-driven Next-Gen Engine. Another feature that 23M1 brings to the table is Fast Track, a new feature that leverages geolocation to bring even more speed to your investigations and a significant advancement for automated, cross camera tracking.
Why Geolocation?
Law enforcement can quickly and easily identify the specific location of an object within video content — both in real-time and post event — and track these objects across cameras, by layering camera geolocation data on top of video analytics search and filter capabilities. Selecting an object in the video, an operator can access and quickly search the video feeds and recorded footage relevant to that specific time, coordinates, and radius. This speed processing capability saves critical time in locating people, vehicles, and more, and is ideal for real-time situations.
The Power of Automation
When running an investigation, video surveillance is often critical for locating an object of interest. A typical workflow for an operator trying to find a suspect, missing person, vehicle, etc. is an extensive series of clicks that looks something like this:
- Object sighted
- Find the relevant camera in your system
- Access the camera in real time or post-event
- Find suspect at a specific time on the camera
- Search for all available cameras
- Pull all available video from these cameras
- Process the extensive footage
- Proceed with the investigation
While boiling this process down to a checklist does not seem very overwhelming, the amount of time it takes to prepare the task is huge. Getting through the processing alone is monumental based on the magnitude of cameras and footage, especially when saving time can literally equate to saving lives.
Fast Track empowers investigators to leverage geolocation to approach the process in a more natural way, empowering them to automatically select the cameras in proximity to their current feed. The same process outlined above suddenly becomes a 1-click process: click to select an object and the system automatically selects all cameras within a certain radius and time, gathers the video, tags them for fast search, and runs appearance similarity, thus reducing task-preparation time to under 10 seconds, while simultaneously cutting processing time in half — and in half again if you’re using our Linux-based Next Gen Engine.
Additionally, the simplicity of Fast Track empowers more people to use and operate the system because it requires less training specialization to perform an automated task that historically requires extensive BriefCam system knowledge and familiarity.
Looking Ahead
In addition to bringing further automation to cross-camera search processes, BriefCam is also working hard to build out Fast Track capabilities even further to meet the robust needs of our users. For instance, technology supported by geolocation often struggles with accuracy at indoor locations, especially those with multiple floors. Since geolocation cannot make vertical distinctions, the geolocation of a camera on the first floor will be the same as a camera on the 8th floor. BriefCam is finding ways to help the system distinguish the differences, by entering camera pairings for instance. It is exciting to see how our team is continually innovating and improving platform capabilities!
For more information on Fast Track and other exciting capabilities from our 2023 M1 launch, click here to schedule a personalized demo!
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