f2’s wearable threat detection system (WTD) provides the ability to help identify individuals on a watchlist before they can cause harm to the public or to law enforcement officers. The principle is that officers wear a small camera connected to a computer. Unlike conventional police body cameras which use wide angle lenses in order to record activity across a broad area, WTD uses a telephoto lens. While the camera can be mounted anywhere on the officer’s uniform, if it’s mounted on his headgear or glasses it will turn as his head turns, enabling each face in front of him to be scanned. Faces detected up to 15 - 20 feet away can be immediately matched against a watchlist.

WTD is designed to identify individuals in a watchlist who are approaching an officer, for example on guard duty or simply walking in the street. It comprises two parts – equipment worn by the officer, and equipment at a central control room.

The telephoto lens captures quality images at a distance. The photo above is an example of the camera mounted on glasses. This is an ideal location as the camera will point at whoever the officer is looking at, enabling a clear shot to be captured. It can also be concealed in the officer’s uniform.

The camera connects to a tablet computer holding a watchlist database of the faces of known terrorists or wanted individuals. These will have been encoded using Face Forensics’ f2 face recognition software, and the resulting encode arrays stored as part of the watchlist on the computer.

The tablet runs unattended and both it and the camera can be left on full-time. The images are processed by the f2 software at a typical rate of around 5 frames/second. Each frame is analyzed to determine if there is a face (or faces) within 15 - 20’. If there is, its characteristics will be analyzed and its own encode array generated. This will be immediately matched against the arrays in the watchlist.

If there is a match above a predefined threshold the officer will immediately be warned of a possible threat, typically via an automatic warning over his earpiece. The image of the individual will be sent directly to a dedicated PC in the control room where the potentially matching face in the watchlist will be displayed side-by-side with it for visual confirmation of whether they are of the same person. This process is virtually instantaneous.

If the control room decides that they are not the same person the officer is notified over his earpiece. If they are of the same person, the control room will advise the officer verbally of the key visual characteristics of the threat, basically facial appearance and upper body clothing. The camera image of the face just captured by the officer’s camera can also be displayed on his Smartphone. If he’s in a position to check this he’ll see both the face and the individual’s current appearance. Simultaneously officers nearby will be ordered to proceed immediately to the officer’s location, again with the images of the suspect.

Wearable Threat Detection is part of the Face Forensics Image Recognition Suite, which includes face recognition, partial face recognition, corpse identification, tattoo recognition, and scene recognition. It runs under Windows 10, 64 bit and comes with SQL Server Express database software.