BrainChip Holdings Ltd. releases BrainChip Studio, a unique software package that promises to be a significant resource for law enforcement professionals. The result of more than 10 years’ worth of development time, the application uses an artificial intelligence technology called and described as a spiking neural network. This is described as a type of neuromorphic computing that simulates the functionality of the human visual tract. This technology is what will aid law enforcement and intelligence organizations to rapidly search vast amounts of video footage for identifying patterns or faces.
The software includes advanced facial detection, extraction, and classification algorithms that are capable of detecting the unique identifying features of human faces. The spiking neural network technology enables BrainChip Studio to work on low resolution video. Most impressive, it requires only a 24 x 24 pixel image to detect and classify faces.
In a recent field trial, BrainChip Studio detected, extracted and classified more than 500,000 facial images during 3.5 hours of video across eight different cameras in real-time. In a separate trial, it processed 36 hours of recorded video in less than two hours, extracting over 150,000 facial images.
It could go without saying that there is a large market opportunity for this type of software given there has been little increase in the ability to analyze video despite the massive growth in video surveillance. This growth is driven by increases in crime and terrorism and an exponential growth in the storage of video data.
Robert Beachler, BrainChip’s Senior Vice President of marketing and business development affirms, “According to IHS market research, 197 million surveillance cameras will be sold during 2017. This is in addition to the estimated 300 million cameras already in use. BrainChip Studio’s forensic search capabilities tame this massive amount of video information, making it practical for a single individual to search for exactly what they need across multiple video sources.”
BrainChip Studio’s spiking neural networks can be trained on a single image in milliseconds, enabling rapid searches of video for patterns not known a priori. This adds to the benefits of being able to recognize patterns in low-resolution, noisy environments, making it viable for the large amount of previously installed video surveillance systems.
Peter van der Made, BrainChip’s founder and CTO offers, “Unlike current convolutional neural network technologies that require extensive pre-labelled datasets and expensive cloud-based training and acceleration, BrainChip’s spiking neural network can be implemented in software with traditional CPUs and trained on premise. Therefore, BrainChip Studio can be deployed in the field in highly secure environments that may not have cloud connectivity.”
BrainChip Studio software runs on Windows or Linux platforms, and is compatible with all major encoded video formats. It is currently available for trials to select law enforcement and intelligence agencies. For more information please visit the company’s website.