The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines surveillance as a “close watch kept over someone or something.”1
That deceptively simple definition speaks to the key function of any law enforcement professional performing surveillance activities. Surveillance can be described as a fundamentally sensory experience, and while new technological breakthroughs are constantly advancing the practice, surveillance will always be only as effective as the eyes and ears of the professionals at the end of the equation.
Several providers of law enforcement products and services take a literal spin on that idea with products that help expand what law enforcement professionals can see, hear, and discover during surveillance.
Sight: Video
Video is a central part of most surveillance activity, and while the footage collected is an enormously useful resource for all manner of investigations, its challenges are also well known.
Video quality, for example, can and does vary widely by source. It can also be difficult for investigators to navigate unusual file formats, much less combine them with other formats and files to form a coherent whole.
When it comes to video, iNPUT-ACE, a software tool developed by the Spokane, Washington, company of the same name, is a leader in helping investigators see more and see it more clearly.
“The world we’re in today is very, very different from the analog days,” said Grant Fredericks, director of law enforcement training for iNPUT-ACE. “[iNPUT-ACE] allows you to accurately interpret video in today’s environment. There’s a big misconception that video is a silent witness. But this integrates all the video. You can create reports.”2
Video evidence does not always exist in widely used formats like MP4 or AVI. According to Fredericks, this type of evidence is more likely to exist in more unusual formats like .DAV, .IRF, .EXE, .SSF, and hundreds of others. iNPUT-Ace can capture and convert 90–95 percent of all proprietary video data. It can also combine videos from multiple sources and create standardized, court-ready reports. The tool also automatically enhances video quality and stabilizes shaky footage, among other things.
“Where investigations are confounded is when a lot of proprietary video systems have video they can’t access,” Fredericks said. ”This is the only tool on the market that can do that . . . And it can tell you what footage is reliable and what isn’t. It can analyze the quality of the video.”
A “drag, drop, and play interface” makes the tool easy to use, Fredericks said. A formal training session consisting of a one- or two-day hands-on course is also available.
“Officers can learn to do it quickly,” Fredericks said. “It’s not a tool where one needs to be certified. If you can run a computer, you can run this.”
For times when a bird’s-eye view is needed, Israeli-based company RT has created a series of aerostats—lighter-than-air balloon vessels—designed to give officers a high-altitude perspective for surveillance and other functions.
“You can build a tower and send it up to 1,000 feet in the air,” said RT CEO Rami Shmueli. “Its duration is almost unlimited, and it builds and inflates very easily. You can build a system after just five days of training.”3
Hearing: Audio
Just as an investigator’s vision can be complemented by better video surveillance tools, so too can hearing be amplified, allowing officers to collect and interpret valuable audio evidence.
One of the main tools—the seemingly humble headphones—can have a massive impact on any investigation. At Invisio Communications Inc., headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, engineers are working to ensure departments get maximum bang for their spending buck by turning headsets into effective multitools. Although they have typically focused largely on military customers, Invisio officials say they are working to bring their communication and hearing protection systems to the law enforcement market.
“We basically blend hearing protection with tactical communications,” said Invisio CEO Ray Clarke. “There are tools from a finger in the ear to foam to earmuffs. We protect hearing, but we take it a step further. There is a mic that enables you to hear while you’re wearing a noise reduction device.”4
Invisio offers several models for various applications. One of these, the X5 headset, is a dual-sided in-ear system with state-of-the-art external microphones used for hear-thru and can accommodate six sizes of exchangeable foam plugs. The microphones provide a key benefit not available in other offerings.
“The microphones give tremendous situational awareness,” Clarke said. “If you’re on a vehicle stakeout and a weapon discharges, or there’s a high amount of noise from sirens, or whatever the case may be, you can still maintain communication with the command center.”
As with video, once audio data are acquired, it often requires additional work in order for the data’s true value to be realized. Phonexia, a software company headquartered in the Czech Republic, makes this work easier with the speech and audio analysis solutions it develops for the law enforcement community.
“We focus on research and development of speech technologies that are helping police forces and forensic experts automate tasks related to speech and audio analysis, which leads to dramatic improvements in efficiency,” said Miroslav Jirku, Phonexia’s vice president of marketing.>5
Phonexia’s main products are Voice Biometrics and Speech Analytics, both using artificial intelligence to ensure accuracy, channel independence, and speed. Voice Biometrics can identify specific speakers in an audio file (based on individual “voiceprints,” not unlike the use of traditional fingerprints) and provides information on speaker characteristics such as language, gender, or age group.
Speech Analytics automates the process of analyzing audio recordings. The tool uses speech-to-text and keyword spotting (i.e., searching audio recordings without first needing to transcribe them). “This saves a massive amount of time while searching for specific words or phrases otherwise hidden in the audio recordings,” Jirku said.
Phonexia also offers a Denoiser application that “removes reverberations and other noises from audio signals, then reconstructs the speech signal to make it more audible to the human ear.”
Discovery: Digital
An investigator needs eyes and ears in the digital world as much as in the physical world. That’s where Fivecast Insight, a software platform conceived by security ana-lysts and law enforcement professionals in Australia, comes into play. Its creators call it “a world-first data collection and analysis platform, powered by machine learning.”6
“The real distinguishing factor for Fivecast Insight is the concept of ‘risk detection,’” said Brenton Cooper, CEO of Fivecast. “We use advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing to identify risks in publicly available data. This allows law enforcement investigators and intelligence analysts to understand the risk behavior of targets over time, as well as understanding which other entities they are engaging with. This is a really powerful capability for understanding risks and can be used for both monitoring known threats and discovering unknown threats.”7
The software’s “deep learning” capabilities enable it to comb through enormous amounts of data and identify valuable trends or information based on a wide, customizable range of criteria. This translates, Cooper said, into major time savings for officers while also achieving new outcomes based on the tool’s analytical capabilities.
“One of the key advantages to Fivecast Insight is the force-multiplication effect,” Cooper said. “Our customers can quickly scale automated collection and analysis from individual entities and small groups out to hundreds of targets at once, vastly increasing the intelligence picture while reducing the staff resources typically required to manually interrogate publicly available data. Insight performs risk assessment of content and allows accurate, organized, and repeatable risk analysis. Risk detectors include keyword and phrase; quote detection; and image analysis, including optical character recognition. Insight excels at network analysis and performs discovery surrounding entities of interest.”
As surveillance continues to be an important tool in law enforcement investigations, companies like these and others are innovating ways to make it even more effective, efficient, and useful.🛡
Notes:
1 Merriam-Webster, s.v. “surveillance.”
2 Grant Fredericks (director of law enforcement training, Input-Ace), telephone interview, June 11, 2019.
3 Rami Smueli (CEO, RT), telephone interview, June 13, 2019.
4 Ray Clarke (CEO, Invisio), telephone interview, June 13, 2019.
5 Miroslav Jirku (vice president of marketing, Phonexia), email interview, June 13, 2019.
6 Fivecast, “About Us.”
7 Brenton Cooper (CEO, Fivecast), email interview, June 14, 2019.
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