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Technology

US police testing AI that learns to spot crimes in CCTV footage

By Richard Kemeny

14 August 2018

CCTV screens

Just like humans, machines can be trained to spot illicit activity

MediaProduction/Getty

SURVEILLANCE cameras are already ubiquitous, but you still need trained guards to spot crime. Keeping that level of attention up can be hard, even for the most focused individual.

Now police in Orlando, Florida, have been testing a system that automatically scans CCTV looking for potentially illicit activity.

Previous AIs have been trained to spot specific activities, such as violence. Yet as crime comes in many forms, these systems are inherently limited. Waqas Sultani at the Information Technology University in Pakistan and his colleagues tried to incorporate a…

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