NSW Police deploys biometric surveillance system

The NSW Police Force has invested in a biometric tracking system that is capable of combining information from numerous video cameras to monitor people, vehicles and even packages or briefcases.

The tracking system is based on a "biometric tracking engine", which is a piece of software developed by Sydney-based Argus-Solutions that can receive information from sources such as a live video camera and then in real time compare the data with information stored on a database.

Peter Harrington, vice president of law enforcement systems at Argus-Solutions, told ZDNet Australia that the surveillance system can be used in numerous scenarios, which include tracking cars going the wrong way down a one way street and monitoring people entering a restricted area. It could even be used to follow the movements of a briefcase in a railway station or airport.

According to Harrington, the system is especially useful because it can automatically "hand over" a target car, person or other object, from one camera to another, without any user interaction.

"If I had a car that was 'of interest' I could lock onto that car as a target and hand it over to another video camera [when it moves out of range of the first camera]. I could even track a package -- such as a briefcase left on a railway platform.

"I could draw an invisible line [in a scene] and say 'if anyone goes across this line in the other direction then track them because they are going the wrong way'," said Harrington.

The system is highly scalable, according to a statement by Argus-Solutions founder and CEO Bruce Lyman. "This application can operate on almost any scale, with the ability to support thousands of cameras and audio feeds."