good image of the person being checked in order to compare it with the database. At access control points or immigration controls, the subject can be instructed to look in a certain direction, but used covertly away from such security checkpoints, positioning cameras to get quality images can be challenging, not to mention the computer processing challenges of identifying a face in a crowd. Research in Australia at the University of Queensland, led by Professor Brian Lovell, has centred on facial recognition when the initial image grab is of poor quality; ‘hit rates’ have been steadily improving. Currently, a trial at a major UK airport is underway using this approach to aid facilitation. The idea is to track passengers (faces) at various stages from check-in to boarding in an attempt to measure the time this takes. The driver here is purely commercial in that there are financial penalties if the process takes too long. It would be impossible to conduct this type of measurement using human observation; it would be prohibitively expensive! And once such a system is in place as part of a facilitation programme; it doesn’t take much to use the same system to help with security.


“...airport security personnel quickly located and followed the man across several camera views, enabling them to give their colleagues his exact whereabouts so that they could intercept him and confiscate the knife...”


Another area of research that has been conducted by Brian Lovell’s team has been at an Asian airport. Once again, the solution does not concern a pure aviation security issue but rather that of asylum seekers, where travellers are arriving without any documentation (or disposing of it in toilets once they disembark the plane) making it impossible to send these people back to their port of origin. The solution sought was a system which photographed all arriving passengers as they disembarked aircraft; it could then


February 2013 Aviationsecurityinternational


easily be determined which aircraft had brought them in if a passenger arrived at an immigration checkpoint without documentation. Another trial by the same team, again in an Asian city, but not at an airport this time, concerns a problem at a large port handling facility. The port employs some 30,000 workers who arrive for duty in a short timeframe; often workers ‘clock on’ for colleagues so that workers get paid even though they are absent. The solution is to use facial recognition technology to verify that the smart card is being used by its owner. An important point here is that the system does not have to be totally accurate as once there is an alarm it can be manually verified from images recorded by the CCTV camera. This solution could easily be adapted in an airport context to not only enhance management but also to improve security.


INTEGRATION


There are many solutions available to make CCTV surveillance effective at airports and it is important that all of them are integrated into a total solution as far as possible. The trend in recent years has been for integration of security and other (mainly safety e.g. fire) systems to facilitate an effective response to any type of alarm, and technology has responded to the challenge. One example of an integrated solution is Proximex Surveillint, which presents all systems on a single screen so that what a controller typically sees is a diagrammatical layout of an area showing locations of alarms and CCTV cameras. The cameras are represented by icons and by clicking on an icon the view from that camera will appear in a new window in the screen. The system is very intuitive and ensures a quick response to any alarm. It also has a sophisticated object tracking feature, the use of which was demonstrated in a recent case at San Diego International Airport. A man with a knife in his carry-on luggage passed through the security checkpoint and, having retrieved his bag from the X-ray


conveyor belt,


into the terminal before authorities could pull the bag. Using the tracking feature, the airport security personnel quickly located and followed the man across several camera views, enabling them to give their colleagues his


Credit: Tyco, Singapore


exact whereabouts so that they could intercept him and confiscate the knife. This procedure prevented a terminal evacuation, thereby, saving the airport approximately $1 million in revenue, hours of personnel time and lots of passenger frustration.


A potentially similar situation


arose some 18 months ago in a major Asian airport where arriving passengers took a wrong turn and ended up crossing from the arrivals level into the departures level with the possibility of ‘contamination’ of the departing passengers. Of course, such a development should not have been possible but CCTV with object tracking could lead to a reliable assessment as to whether there was any contact with departing passengers or whether any items were ‘left behind’ in the departures area. Effective security relies on effective people – but these may be hard to come by. We all know that security doesn’t always attract the brightest of candidates but by using effective security technology much of the tedium of the work can be passed from man to machine, meaning less dependence on the former. This results in smaller security teams, less tedious work, therefore higher motivation (hopefully) and less chance of security events being missed. More importantly, effective use of CCTV technology can help achieve a level of security that is just not possible otherwise. What must also be remembered is that airports are about people taking flights and facilitation is the priority. Security is a drag on this but effective deployment of technology can reduce this drag and help get passengers from the check-in counters to their aircraft more quickly and without compromising security and safety.


disappeared


Mark Medwecki has lived in Hong since 1977 and spent over thirty years with the Hong Kong Police Force. After leaving the police he worked with the Aviation Security Company at Hong Kong International Airport and now is a partner at WISH AVSEC Training and Consultancy providing aviation security consultancy services in mainland China and Asia.


www.asi-mag.com 37


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