Imagery intelligence for CCTV analysis

Imagery intelligence has been a recognised profession in the military for over 70 years – and there are significant parallels between the analysis of CCTV images and the analysis carried out by military imagery intelligence experts. Dave Ashton, director of Global Intelligence Solutions, spoke to Police Professional about the similarities between the two professions, and how improving the skill sets of CCTV analysts can improve investigations.

There is a proven cognitive process that has been identified, which allows some of those people with an aptitude for imagery analysis to become successful in the field of CCTV analysis, said Dave Ashton, director of Global Intelligence Solutions. A former military imagery intelligence expert, Mr Ashton now manages Global Intelligence Solutions, and has also been researching CCTV analysis across the world for a number of years. The company has a global customer base and its work includes providing forensic imagery analysis support to clients around the world. It also provides imagery intelligence training to military and civilian clients, also internationally.

Mr Ashton explained some of the problems that are arising around CCTV use in law enforcement and discussed a new initiative that he has been recently involved in establishing, to help combat one such issue. “There has been much publicity regarding the growth of CCTV usage, with currently over four million cameras reportedly in use in the United Kingdom alone,” said Mr Ashton.

“Yet although there are clear benefits to these systems in crime detection and prevention, the success of CCTV still has some issues that cause problems to the successful prosecution of offenders and also with the detection of intelligence that can assist a criminal investigation.”

The issue

Four million cameras running 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, generate a massive amount of imagery and this can create issues around handling that information – from a storage point of view as well as in terms of analysing the data. As the systems improve and digital systems take over, the better resolution increases the data size, thereby compounding the problem.

Fortunately, said Mr Ashton, not all the imagery collected contains evidence of crimes and only a minute proportion of recorded imagery is needed for law enforcement agencies. When an incident does occur, the appropriate level of handling is required to maintain the integrity of the imagery for the evidence chain, ensuring any potential prosecutions are not jeopardised by inappropriate tampering of the evidence.

In addition, when an incident occurs involving a large number of cameras over a wide area, the amount of imagery evidence can be overwhelming and in an incident such as the July 7 terrorist attacks in London in 2005, images were sought from not only CCTV but also witnesses’ cameras and mobile phone photographs.

However, some work has already been done within law enforcement agencies in the UK to put into place police units that can specialise in this area.

“There are some very effective police units which can deal with video evidence, such as the Visual Images Identification and Detection Office (VIIDO) unit in London,” said Mr Ashton.

“I had the pleasure of meeting Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville of the VIIDO unit earlier this year at a conference where we both gave presentations. I was very much encouraged by his enthusiasm for pioneering the effective use of CCTV imagery. The results have been clear and the VIIDO unit is successfully handling images to assist in the identification and subsequent prosecution of offenders.”

Mr Ashton said the problem that remains in and around the UK is that regions are often overwhelmed by images that frequently do not get analysed, and more importantly, the question must be raised: are the images being analysed effectively?

“Is there critical evidence on imagery being overlooked?” said Mr Ashton. “A number of police units look t