HYDERABAD: Will the Close Circuit Television Cameras gradually evolve into doing something more than just monitoring? After all, mobiles phones did graduate to the much better variants—smartphones. Imagine that the lakh-strong CCTV system of Hyderabad becomes smart enough to detect a violent crime as it happens? In what could be termed as a stepping stone towards this direction, a team of researchers from—National Institute of Technology (NIT), Warangal; University of Cambridge; and Indian Institute of Sciences—are developing an Artifical Intelligence (AI) system that can detect violent behaviour in a crowd, with the help of drones. The AI is being ‘taught’ to identify human gestures that are violent in nature by scanning the crowd using a drone. This AI is a Drone Surveillance System (DSS).
At present the AI has been taught to detect five violent poses —punching, kicking, strangling, shooting and stabbing. “These are basic gestures that are simple, but we will be teaching the AI more gestures in the future,” said Devendra Patil, studying mechanical engineering at NIT, Warangal, one of the three researchers working on the AI.
“The drone will take a video clip of the people and analyse their movements. At the moment, the video is not analysed in real time but we will be doing a live feed test of the AI in coming months. At present, it’s difficult for the police to monitor all CCTV cameras. However, the AI can monitor the CCTV footage without getting tired. But for the AI to work with a CCTV system like that of Hyderabad or Mumbai, it will require better cameras,” he added.
AI to be tested in Warangal soon
The researchers of paper titled ‘Eye in the Sky: Real-time Drone Surveillance System (DSS) for Violent Individuals Identification using ScatterNet Hybrid Deep Learning Network’ claimed that they were able to achieve 94 per cent accuracy in identifying violent poses, however, the accuracy dips as more people enter the camera frame. The AI is expected to be tested in the coming months at the Technozion and Spring Spree festivals at NIT, Warangal.