Big brother ‘smart city’ surveillance systems developed by biometrics technology firm ROC will be rolled out in Marion County, West Virginia. The system mainly uses AI analysis of security camera video to record, analyze, catalog and report people’s faces, license plates and inanimate objects like firearms in real-time, all the time.
The system, called ‘Vision AI‘, will integrate with existing security infrastructure, including license plate readers and bodycams. It will leverage artificial intelligence and include ‘smart sensors’ and other ‘edge devices’ to enable live-time security monitoring.
The ‘benefits’ of this ‘smart city’ system are said to include road safety enforcement, accident detection, parking and toll road monitoring, in addition to crime prevention and crowd control, according to Biometric Update.
“The project is funded through a $1 million earmark from the Department of Justice with congressional support from U.S. Senators Joe Manchin and Shelly Moore Capito. Marion County Sheriff Jimmy Riffle led efforts on the law enforcement end,” Biometric Update said Monday.
The firm’s facial recognition and gun detection systems have already been deployed in West Virginia public schools, with the intention to expand to new markets.
“Our live video analytics platform ROC Watch will be used to identify visitors and help administrators manage building access before guests enter the front office. Through a fast, easy mobile enrollment process, staff and visitors set up a profile within a virtual badgeless visitor management system stored locally with each school,” ROC said in a press release in 2023.
The systems constantly monitor every individual’s face and have reportedly been successful in targeting vagrants and sex offenders trying to enter school grounds.
“Through constantly monitoring school camera feeds 24 hours a day, ROC helps schools be more dynamic in how they deal with visitors and threats. It is a great way to take existing passive infrastructure and capabilities and transform them into proactive, intelligent, future-ready systems,” a 2024 ROC press release said.
ROC says that their software is top-ranked in the realm of facial, iris and fingerprint analysis, preforming 200 million facial recognition identifications per year and specializing in real-time authentication. Their main markets are FinTech (digital financial services), public safety (such as with the West Virginia system’s rollout), national security (which they list the term ‘secure borders’) and commercial security.
Besides real-time facial recognition systems, the firm has also developed software for real-time latent fingerprint recognition and real-time iris recognition for the banking and border control theaters of operation.
In addition to their biometric identification software, some of the more exotic abilities of ROC’s systems include ‘facial analytics‘ which utilize AI to identify a person’s gender, age, geographic origin (likely meaning ethnicity), detection of objects like glasses, masks, screens and printouts as well as facial hair analysis, tattoo matching and even ’emotion detection analysis’.