SeeQuestor, the fully integrated system designed to radically improve the speed and capacity of handling video footage by law enforcement agencies, has been launched in London. The system can deliver results up to 100 times quicker than current technology and methods by combining the huge processing power of a supercomputer with intelligent software and cutting-edge graphics processors to aid investigations.SeeQuestor delivers a toolkit of functionality and efficiency improvements that have been designed to enhance the skills of human analysts and investigators in order to enable them to focus their time on other areas of the investigation, reducing precious man hours. The platform is already being used in real cases by law enforcement agencies on four continents.
Henry Hyde-Thomson, CEO of SeeQuestor, said: “For the first time, compute power and graphics capabilities have developed to the extent that we can completely change how we can look at video. Instead of playing video sequentially to look for something interesting, we can pre-index videos with all of the movements, faces and people present; and then find the person or incident of interest many times quicker than ever before.”
SeeQuestor is the result of decadesof research & development with a highly skilled software development team and some of the world’s leading experts in computer vision and deep learning. It was designed with inputs from the Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police and has been tested on real cases with police forces from around the world.
“SeeQuestor was created to meet a desperate need in law enforcement: the need to process and analyse thousands of hours of video footage, often of poor quality or unreadable format, and then analyse that footage to fast-track the identification of persons of interest,” continued Hyde-Thomson. “It has taken years to get to today where, for the first time, compute power and graphics processing have been sophisticated enough to deliver the required performance to bring SeeQuestor to life.”
Created in response to law enforcement challenges
SeeQuestor replaces outdated tools and technology that are recognised as unfit for purpose, at a time when the security environment is becoming ever more challenging.
“The current technology is quite simply not up to scratch,” saidDetective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, Head of Central Forensic Image Team, New Scotland Yard. He explained: “When the police see enormous amounts of video, that has to be viewed manually and normally it takes one person one hour to review – it’s almost an impossibility to do that much. A system that will automate this and quickly scan the footage, it may give us the links and major leads that we can focus on.
“Anything that makes man and machine work together in perfect harmony to get us to identify more criminals and find more victims would be a wonderful tool for the police.”
