London-based Facewatch, working with Staff Security Brazil, is offering facial recognition to match known offenders against centralised watchlists and provide alerts to businesses who are part of the network.
The system, initially operating in a shopping centre before a roll-out, has already led police to capture five serious criminals in the first two months of use. Around 400,000 faces per month are being captured and compared with images held on watchlists provided by police and businesses. When the system spots a match, security staff and police are sent alerts within seconds. If there is no match, the captured faces are deleted. The system learns by taking the user feedback to improve over time.
Mr Pampurre head of security for BRMalls said: “For BRMalls, Facewatch is a crucial tool to support us in combating criminality.”
BRMalls is one of the largest shopping centre chains in South America and is one of the first to adopt the Facewatch cloud-based facial recognition system, which has been running within a shopping mall in Rio de Janeiro since July.
Security Manager Jesse Barbosa said: “Having adopted Facewatch in our mall recently, the identification of five criminals already has proved to us how effective it is in supporting our daily operations.”
This month, Staff Security is preparing for a second phase roll-out in three major cities in Brazil, including Sao Paulo, and the intention is to integrate the facial recognition system into thousands of locations.
Matheus Paiva, Chief Operations Officer of Staff Security, said: “Staff Security has already invested over 400,000 GBP in the project and has been working for 12 months to map the infrastructure, train personnel and to gain an understanding of how to make the product work effectively in Brazil. We are now taking on and training new distribution partners and allies across Brazil.”
Staff Security has recently teamed up with TECVOZ, a Brazilian camera manufacturer to provide cameras which have been tested with the system and the new technology will be distributed through their network of 550 installers.
Facewatch is using Allevate Limited’s Face-Searcher service and Tygart Technology, Inc’s MXSERVER facial recognition ‘engine’ but can work with any system.
Nick Fisher, CEO of Facewatch said: “We have been working with Staff Security for some years now and it is great to see the technology coming to the market and working even better than anticipated. Brazil provides huge opportunities for Facewatch and the police are already actively providing watchlists because they can see the potential of this technology for improving public safety.”
And HC Bambirra, CEO of Staff Security said: “Now we have completed our proof of concepts we have proved that the system delivers value to the businesses by alerting them of criminals entering the premises, we are ready to start our expansion program across Brazil. Getting to this point is a major turning point – we we have now a full understanding both technically and commercially of this game changing product and a fully equipped office in Brazil. With Facewatch we are ready to deliver the world’s first mass market facial recognition roll-out to businesses.”
