Queensland Police Commissions Seequestor To Provide Innovative Support In Complex Murder Investigation
SeeQuestor, the system designed to radically improve the speed and capacity of handling video footage by law enforcement agencies, has been commissioned by Queensland Police Service (QPS) to provide “innovative support” in a high-profile murder case.
Detectives from QPS have just completed a review of 21,000 hours of CCTV material they had collected during ongoing work on a “protracted and complex” investigation, relating to the murder of a 12-year-old child.
The detectives travelled to London to review the video material, and analysed all the priority footage within four days. Review of the CCTV material was considered a necessity by the investigating officers with a view to corroborating information generated by witnesses, but had proved impossible with conventional methods.
Acting Detective Inspector C. P. Knight of the Homicide Investigation Unit said: “The need for innovative strategies led us to SeeQuestor as the task of reviewing the footage using conventional policing methods proved unachievable.
“The SeeQuestor platform allowed two detectives to review all of the priority footage within four days with the highest degree of accuracy. Its contribution to this homicide investigation has been invaluable.”
Henry Hyde-Thomson, CEO of SeeQuestor, said: “Since its launch, SeeQuestor has been commissioned to work on real cases for police forces in four continents. The dramatic increase in the speed at which thousands of hours of CCTV and video footage can be analysed has enabled investigators to generate new leads and move cases forward. These developments simply wouldn’t have been possible through conventional review methods alone.”
SeeQuestor 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 NVIDIA processors to aid investigations.
The system delivers a toolkit of functionality and efficiency improvements that have been designed to enhance the skills of human analysts and investigators to enable them to focus their time on other areas of the investigation, reducing precious man hours.
Hyde-Thomson explained: “For the first time, compute power has 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 movements, faces and people present; and then find the person or incident of interest many times quicker than ever before.”
Supercomputing power
The SeeQuestor Model 20 server rack uses eight NVIDIA® Tesla® processors, delivering 60 teraflops of processing power – around 70 times more powerful than a desktop computer.
Alex White, NVIDIA Vice President of Enterprise in EMEA, said: “Our technology is being applied to solve some of the world’s most complex problems, from self-driving cars and medical breakthroughs to making our society safer. By harnessing this technology, SeeQuestor’s solution puts the power of a supercomputer in the hands of law enforcement agencies, unlocking the ‘black box’ of video data and accelerating their investigations.”
SeeQuestor is the result of decades of 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 input from the Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police and has been tested on real cases with police forces from around the world.
A video overview of SeeQuestor’s capability can be seen on https://vimeo.com/189177590.
SeeQuestor’s Respect for Human Rights and Data Privacy
We are strongly committed to civil liberties, as embodied in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. SeeQuestor technology facilitates respect for Article 14, especially the right to a trial without undue delay, and the right to know the case against one.
SeeQuestor as a company is conscious of and respects Article 17 privacy rights, including under the interpretation provided by UN Human Rights Committee General Comment 16 (1988), s. 10, which insists on proper legal regulation of the collection and storage of personal data.
Typically, there is a justification for law enforcement agencies under the law for analysing video data in connection with a criminal investigation or search for a missing person, subject to a set of principles – necessity, proportionality and accountability – that protect our civil liberties. We have designed SeeQuestor to allow these principles to be applied with tight authorisation controls, data retention policies and a black box audit trail.
SeeQuestor supports analysts looking through large quantities of CCTV and other video data. The platform can convert the various formats of CCTV video into the industry-standard MPEG4. Then, SeeQuestor’s powerful video analytics detects all the movement, faces and people, and indexes each video to allow for fast review and search. This solution significantly enhances the speed at which analysts locate people of interest and find incriminating evidence in thousands of hours of video. www.seequestor.com
