Pro-Active Smart City Surveillance

Ever expanding, cities today must pay more attention to protect the people and properties gathered. It is evident to anyone with access to global news that now even the most developed cities are faced with huge safety threats, ranging from terrorists’ attacks aiming at well-populated areas and historically significant places to road accidents that keep increasing with the number of automobiles. A smart and integrated system for urban security is in urgent need.

In the past, the administration was heavily reliant on man power and so investment mostly went into increasing the number of people dealing with problems. However, this no longer works since the volume of population and data have exploded in the process of urbanization. The huge expense on manpower is disproportionate to the result achieved, especially when concerning safety. For example, it now takes more time for more policemen to track down a suspect in a big city, not only because there are so many people and places to check but also due to the advanced transport systems that can easily move a person somewhere else very quickly. Then there is the inconvenience for ordinary citizens during such an operation to consider.

Equipped with AI technologies and a highly integrated platform, the Dahua Smart City Solution aims to address the safety issues of mega-cities without dramatically expanding police forces. To be more specific, the deep-learning empowered video surveillance performs timely and effective risk detection. The unified platform allows a faster emergency response, and powerful data mining helps to get more insights from the data that front-end systems collect.

Fine Details
For example, deep-learning redefines the capabilities of the video analysis we know. Ranked No.1, Dahua achieved 99.78% facial recognition accuracy in LFW (Labeled Faces in the Wild, a well-known facial recognition benchmark for academic purposes) in October 2016. Deep-learning even allows instant classification of humans and vehicles appearing in video, capturing extracted detailed features such as the color of their clothes, gender, headwear, license plate number, vehicle color, size, make, model, cellphone and seat belt usage in the vehicle.

Four Working Stages
The overall working process of the Dahua Smart City Solution can be seen as four stages; prevention, detection, response and investigation. By improving each, the solution can improve city running in general.
The stage of Prevention means picking out and focusing on potentially dangerous persons and factors before they really do harm to public safety. This requires the ability to collect and analyze big data. The solution provides advanced forecasting models that give a better chance of predicting events. For example, with comprehensive analysis of violation data collected by traffic enforcement cameras, the system can generate a watch list for vehicles with numerous violation records.
The stage of Detection means real time surveillance in various forms, including the deployment of 360-degree panoramic camera and ultra-long range, all weather monitoring thermal cameras. In addition to multifunctional cameras above, deep-learning empowered smart video surveillance can automatically detect risky individuals and activities from the massive data collected. In fact, one of the company’s traffic enforcement systems helped Hangzhou city automatically detect 29,823 vehicles’ illegal behavior during the G20 Summit, which greatly reduced the burden on policemen who could then put more focus on protecting the key summit area.

The stage of Response means enabling key organizations in the city to react to security threats in real time. Now is the time for authorities to act against possible escalation of the incident, for which Dahua improves communication efficiency through its integrated platform, allowing unified command and centralized data storage as well as cross-department information sharing. Suppose a natural disaster took place in the city; the Smart City Solution could would report it on a single e-map with available emergency response resources to all relevant departments and agencies while providing seamless monitoring of the site to all approaching units.
The stage of Investigation means being able to quickly analyze all data collected by different systems and provide insights to facilitate the recovery of crucial criminal incidents after they happen. At this stage, technologies such as video synopsis provide a short summary showing all moving objects from a long video and support moving object queries according to different criteria such as size, color, direction and speed. A rich set of data mining methods like active area analysis, active target analysis and trajectory analysis are also available. So if a criminal tried to escape wearing different clothes or using different cars, he is highly unlikely to make it in a city equipped with a Dahua Smart City Solution.

Smart city solutions benefit everyone in all four metrics. Governments can decrease spending and crime rates at the same time whilst increasing citizen safety, survival rates and citizen approval ratings. Citizens will be safer and enjoy better living standards without the burden of increased public spending. In short, they will be happier with both the government and their lives. By remaining ahead of the market with expertise in intelligent visual processing technologies and emphasizing its core value propositions of innovation, quality and service, such technology will continuously contribute to a safer society and smarter living, benefiting city dwellers worldwide.

The Smart City Solution Delivers on Dahua’s promise of “Safer Society, Smart Living” in 4 Key Metrics:
‘Government investment’ measures the level of continued commitment by governments to maintain good function and development of systems in place. After deploying a smart city solution, London’s police investment declined by 10% yet the criminal activity prevention score actually improved by 0.5% since 2015.
‘Safety result’ measures changes in the levels of crime and risk to citizens. It also assesses the public’s perception of how well the city’s authorities can respond to incidents. This is improved by the efficiency savings that Dahua’s surveillance systems provide.
‘Social benefits’ assess the ability of the public to enjoy entertainment and leisure activities safely and how their affinity for the government changes.
‘Economic benefit’ accounts for personal wealth, spending on tourism and retail along with employment rates and the city’s protection against short-term economic fluctuations.