Georgia To Roll Out Tens Of Thousands Of CCTV Cameras With Real-Time Facial Recognition Capabilities

‘Surveillance using CCTV cameras is old hat these days, even for locations outside the world’s CCTV capital, London. But there’s an important step-change taking place in the sector, as operators move from simply observing and recording, to analyzing video feeds automatically using facial recognition software. Techdirt has written about this area a few times, but these examples have all been fairly small-scale and exploratory. News from Georgia — the one in the Caucasus, not the State — shows that things are moving fast in this field:
NEC Corporation today announced that it has provided an advanced surveillance system for cities utilizing facial recognition to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia, in cooperation with Capital Systems LLC, a leading system developer. The system began operation in June of this year, and works in combination with 400 CCTV surveillance cameras installed in Georgia’s major cities, including the capital, Tbilisi.
The system utilizes NeoFace Watch, NEC’s real-time facial recognition software for video, featuring the world’s highest recognition precision. It checks images captured by CCTV cameras against pictures of suspects and others registered in a watch list, making it possible to identify figures rapidly and accurately.
This system was introduced as part of Georgia’s “Safe City, Safe Region, Safe Country” program aiming to improve public safety. Georgia also plans to install tens of thousands of additional cameras nationwide in the future.’
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