Forensics

Massive Deployment of Face Recognition Systems in Moscow

Moscow has been bringing CCTV (Closed Circuit TV) security to the next level, through a partnership that brings artificial intelligence to bear in ways that will make face recognition more accurate and more intuitive. Moscow’s Department of Information Technologies has recently finished deploying a city-wide, 160,000-camera video surveillance system that integrates facial recognition technology from NtechLab. Yet only a portion of those is currently active, due to the cost of implementing the technology.

Officials say, according to tech.co, that the system covers 95 percent of the entrances to both commercial buildings and apartment buildings throughout the city. “To date, there is no other security system in the world that has implemented facial recognition at this scale,” says Artem Ermolaev, chief information officer for the department. The idea is to leverage artificial intelligence algorithms in facial recognition technology to ultimately make CCTV surveillance more usable.

“The term ‘face recognition’ might include a number of disjointed tasks, such as detecting human faces in an image or video stream, gender recognition, age estimation, and identifying one person across multiple images and verifying that the two images belong to the same person,’ explains Natalya Frolova from NTechLab. The partnership with the city of Moscow is based on the artificial neural network that allows for deep learning.