The following is paid content sponsored by Veritone.
By Police1 BrandFocus Staff
Big Data is everywhere, and it keeps getting bigger. It’s estimated that 90 percent of all data on the internet has been generated in the past two years, more than three-quarters of it audio and video clips, and the pace continues to accelerate exponentially.
For law enforcement, this creates an information overload of evidence that can’t be easily searched or analyzed. This recent explosion of law enforcement data, particularly video and audio that by its nature is unstructured and unsearchable, means police are collecting information without the tools to manage it or turn it into actionable intelligence.
How artificial intelligence can help law enforcement
Veritone, an artificial intelligence technology company, has built an open platform to provide law enforcement with AI applications called cognitive engines that can process unstructured data from multiple sources to help police extract actionable intelligence. These cognitive engines include applications for audio transcription, facial recognition and more.
Data that has been processed and correlated using artificial intelligence is easily searchable and enables analysis to sift for patterns, says Dan Merkle, president of Veritone Public Safety, saving countless hours and reducing the time and expense needed to solve crimes.
How the Veritone AI Platform works
The Veritone Platform automates correlation and analysis by providing a one-stop shop for processing media evidence. Users can upload any file format, choose which cognitive engines to run, and then search the resulting indexed databases for the desired information.
Everything is accessed through a simple web-based user interface – if you can get to a browser, you can use the tools, says Merkle.
Veritone helps law enforcement agencies make sense of overwhelming amounts of unstructured data in three ways:
1. The platform is omnivorous, taking in audio and video from public and private sources from CCTV security video to social media clips to body-worn or dashboard camera video. These disparate data sources are integrated into an indexed data set that can be searched and layered for multi-dimensional correlation. This provides investigators with a way to integrate data from varied sources into a unified pool of actionable intelligence.
2. A variety of cognitive engines can be used to extract specific information such as words, faces, license plates, geolocation, time of day, etc. The system automates analysis to find patterns that provide useful information to investigators. The engines currently available perform with comparable accuracy to processing by a human, and they deliver results much faster. Performance continues to improve as the technology matures.
3. The Veritone Platform exists on the Microsoft Azure Government cloud for secure online access and mobility so that data becomes a dynamic tool for comparison and analysis rather than siloed on individual servers.
Why AI is a better solution for video evidence
Veritone’s AI platform automates what is otherwise a tedious series of tasks, says Merkle. Veritone can process and search everything all at once instead of requiring separate analysis of each end-point solution, a slow and costly process.
“With current systems, if you want to find something in there you basically have to pay someone to sit down and listen to it in real time,” Merkle said, “but a transcription cognitive engine can process that audio and turn it into a text file that is then searchable just like any other Word document or structured data that can be searched and correlated against other files, so you’re able to start creating a more complete picture.”
In addition to the investigative boost, AI automation makes responding to public records requests and complicated queries from attorneys much faster and easier, says Merkle.
The future of AI technology in law enforcement
Artificial intelligence for policing is still in the early development of its capabilities and uses, he adds. Veritone monitors more than 3,000 individual cognitive engines in development, adding new and better tools as they become available.
Sentiment analysis is a newer development in artificial intelligence, and Veritone offers analysis of phrases and words in a transcript for positive or negative sentiment. Merkle says analytic tools based on tone of voice and facial expression are in development and coming soon, and he describes the Veritone Platform as “future proof.”
“Even those of us who are knee-deep in artificial intelligence can’t predict where all the functionality and capabilities are going to be developed,” he said. “Having a platform that can take on any of these cognitive engines as they are developed future proofs the investment so that you don’t have to change out platforms, which is very expensive and difficult to do.”
As the technology matures, Merkle cautions that balancing privacy and transparency will be a key challenge. He recommends that law enforcement agencies consider best practices for use, as well as possible unintended consequences, in order to make sound policy decisions.
For more information about how artificial intelligence is transforming public safety, download Veritone’s free white paper, Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe?