Vigilant solution specializes in law enforcement agency advanced analytics using license plate reading, facial recognition technology, and more. TechDecisions spoke with Tom Joyce, Vice President of Business Development at Vigilant Solutions and DRN Data, about how the company’s technology is helping law enforcement through advanced analytics.
TD: On your website, you say that Vigilant Solutions was, “developed for law enforcement, by law enforcement.” What was the development process like? How did law enforcement play a part in the creation of this solution?
TJ: Vigilant Solutions prides itself on ensuring that law enforcement agencies have top-of-the-line technology available to improve safety for both officers and communities and create new leads for agencies investigating crimes. Our team comprises former law enforcement agency members who have served and protected our communities, bringing with them their experience and expertise in the law enforcement technology spaces. They work closely with our software development team to architect features and analytics that provide the most insight to investigations.
TD: Tell me about some of the unique qualities of Vigilant’s technology that separates it from competition.
TJ: At its core, Vigilant’s technology is an efficiency tool that helps to develop leads and solve crimes.
Our technology can be divided into two separate categories: our License Plate Reading (LPR) technology and our Facial Recognition (FR) technology. Our LPR technology provides agencies with powerful analytics for greater vehicle detection intelligence, allowing them to develop more leads and run investigations more efficiently and effectively.
Our approach to LPR is four-fold. Data is gathered when both fixed and mobile LPR cameras take photos of license plates, capturing date, time and GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. Then, each plate image captured, along with the data for that image (date, time, location) is stored in our Virginia database as an LPR record that can be searched only by authorized personnel.
Each agency owns the LPR data it generates, and each agency can decide whether it wants to share that data with other agencies – but we do remind them that the more data available, the greater chance of developing a lead, because sharing gains them access to another 1.5 billion detections nationwide.
Plus, even agencies without LPR cameras can benefit by using our commercial data, which is gathered nationwide in commercial applications such as access control, tolling, asset recovery and more. We are the only LPR provider that can offer more than 6 billion nationwide detections, and more than 150 million additional detections are added monthly.
Our FR technology is first and foremost a biometric tool, not a biometric science. Our facial recognition solution and analytics work together to deliver possible matches to help develop new leads, and agencies of all sizes and skill levels can use our intuitive tools to support their investigative processes.
In the field, law enforcement officials snap photos with mobile devices to quickly identify individuals, upload images to the agency gallery to share as needed, and manage watchlists and receive alerts important to an assignment. Analysts use either Web browser-based or desktop applications to upload and process images, and then search against a gallery of more than 16 million images to identify matches.
Breakthrough pre-processing tools give agencies the ability to use more images, even poor-quality probe images from social media, cell phone snaps and CCTV cameras. Users can process the images within the software without the need for external graphic design tools or resources. The software analyzes more than 350 facial vectors, and we continue to refine and innovate our technology for even greater accuracy. We also offer full audit trails of the process to support investigations.
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