Singapore has selected consortia led by four companies to participate in its 15-month Safe City Test Bed, which is aimed at providing insights on how technology and analytics can aid urban management and public safety.
The four companies are Accenture [ACN], AGT International, the Cassidian division of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., and NEC’s Asia Pacific subsidiary, and each will conduct pilot projects in parallel.
In Singapore, the Safe City effort is being led by the Safety and Security Industry Programme Office (SSIPS), which was jointly created by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Singapore Economic Development Board to develop a safety and security industry with innovation capabilities. The project will enable the participating companies to use Singapore as a “living laboratory” to develop concepts and solutions that can be used worldwide to create safe cities, says Gian Y-Hsen, co-director of the SSIPO.
The project participants will take advantage of existing data from sources such as video cameras to automatically improve situational awareness, improve inter-agency coordination, anticipate security threats, optimize the use of manpower, and develop real-time analytical insights.
“Technology is a force multiplier that can help government agencies cope with the increasing demands and complex security challenges which arise from rapid urbanization,” says Anselm Lopez, co-director of the SSIPO and director for Capability Development and International Partnerships at Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs.
Accenture says that existing CCTV systems create a big data challenge, with estimates that 98 percent of the video footage goes unseen, and is only used for investigative or evidential purposes.
“Applying video analytics to existing video feeds will yield much more operational and security insights to the various government agencies involved, ranging from vehicle traffic management, to people flows in mass transit, to incident or anomaly detection,” and Accenture spokesman tells HSR via an email response to questions. “This is akin to having ‘electronic eyes’ watch, without blinking, 100 percent of video feeds on a 24 x 7 basis and generating various alerts and insights for operators to focus on, making the city more aware of what happens in real time, and able to react or be proactive to improve operations and citizen well being.”
Accenture says its solution will apply computer vision and predictive analytics to video feeds across pilot locations to detect public safety concerns. When an incident is identified, an alert will be issued to the appropriate government agency, enabling relevant authorities to detect and monitor situations as diverse as crowd and traffic movements, public disorder incidents and environmental threats such as flooding.
NEC plans to offer an end-to-end interagency collaboration infrastructure that will provide it with lessons for further development and solutions.
“The Safe City Test Bed offers NEC an ideal platform to conduct research and development, to test our innovations and to eventually bring products to the global market,” says Tan Boon Chin, managing director at NEC Asia Pacific’s Regional Competency Centre for Public Safety.
Japan’s NEC recently launched its “Safer Cities” global initiative that offers a comprehensive suite of safety solutions such as immigration control, city surveillance, national identification, law enforcement, cyber security and emergency and disaster management to governments around the world.
In addition to video analytics, other technologies that will be applied in the Singapore project include e-sensing, sensors, as well as risk analysis and relationship modeling.
Switzerland’s AGT, which is teamed with Japan’s Hitachi for the project, will apply its CityMIND analytics software solution, which provides real-time situational information and alerts of unusual behavior or event patterns. The company says sensors for behavioral recognition, social media intelligence platforms, and smart environmental sensors will be integrated into CityMIND.
NEC is teamed with ESRI Singapore, iOmniscient Pte Ltd., Oracle, G Element Pte Ltd., GreenFossil Pte Ltd., and ZWEEC Analytics Pte Ltd.