As it makes to scale its ‘digital evidence cloud’.
New South Wales Police has “infused” its insights platform with Microsoft Azure-based artificial intelligence and machine learning services to fast-track video and audio evidence analysis process.
Microsoft recently worked with Australia’s largest policing agency to compartmentalise cognitive processing for the core investigation platform in Azure and feed the results back.
The work started ahead of a future migration of insights to Azure, expecting to take place “shortly”.
As disclosed by iTnews in April, NSW Police is working to stand up a protected-level Azure data centre under what it termed out as the ‘Azura Cloud Project’ to assist its broader transformation program.
NSW Police anticipates to retire, re-architect or replace more than 200 legacy systems with cloud-based systems as part of the program.
It hopes to use Azure to back up a range of applications, including the integrated policing operating system (IPOS) that will replace its legacy core policing system (COPS).
IPOS, as well as the insights platform, are considered as the “building blocks” for a ‘digital evidence cloud’ that has been developed and trialled with Microsoft and is ready to scale.
Swift analysis for leads
Having spent months of training Azure cognitive services, NSW Police trial out the AI and ML to analysing video and audio evidence from the insights platform in February.
The force was able to “interpret petabytes of CCTV footage automatically and at speed to provide rapid access to leads that officers can pursue”.
Generally, approximately a terabyte worth of computer vision is pulled each day to assist investigations. That includes from CCTV, body-worn video (BWV) cameras and dashcams.
NSW Police is also utilising Azure for voice-to-text transcriptions of police interviews, which is attracting the attention of other law enforcement agencies, within Australian as well as overseas.
Increasing use of AI and intelligence software in diverse fields is a trend that could be seen not only in Australia, but also in other countries such as Singapore in the Commonwealth and AI will enhance efficiency in operations as well as reduce human errors that may, sometimes, be fatal mistakes.
