BigBrother & Aggression Detection
BigBrother is constantly working on security. How can we better guarantee the safety of your customers, your employees, and yourself? In order to provide an answer to this question, we dare to look further and combine new content and technologies.
Because safety succeeds or fails with people, it is logical to focus on the people in your business… and their state of mind! After all, calm and satisfied people are rarely the cause of undesirable situations. People who are aggressive or under the influence of alcohol or drugs can often lead to potentially dangerous situations. Both for themselves and for their surroundings.
New data source
“Data is worth its weight in gold.” It’s a common cliché today, but, like with every cliché, there’s a grain of truth in it. During our research, we found that people who are aggressive, for example, move differently. This in itself is not a new insight; you will probably recognise it if you start paying attention to it. But the question we’re asking ourselves is: “How can we recognise this automatically?”.
That’s why BigBrother is working on a new technical solution with which we can create a new data source: converting video images into data about people’s gait profiles. We extract information from the pixels of video systems and translate it into data about the way the person moves in the image. This concerns things like the angle of the knee, the extent to which someone walks bent over, or their speed.
Research into state of mind and movement
Of course, just converting the data in the right way isn’t going to get us all the way there. It’s all about finding out what that data says about a person’s state of mind. Someone who is drunk, for example, won’t be as capable of walking in a straight line. But what is really typical of an aggressive person? This is what our R&D department is currently investigating, in collaboration with a number of passionate partners.
Cooperation with scientists
The support given to BigBrother for this project is proof that this solution has a lot of potential. Departments at the UMC Utrecht & Hogeschool Zuyd make employees and students available to help us with this research. It’s a perfect combination because of all the knowledge we bring together in this way: knowledge on people and their way of thinking, movement profiles, kinematic variables and their measurement are a valuable addition to our knowledge of camera systems and the analysis and automation of data on location.
A safe environment for everyone
Ultimately, we are working together on a common objective: to make things safer for everyone. Imagine that a festival has been held in the neighbourhood. Your employee is the only person at the box office when a group of aggressive festival-goers enter. How convenient would it have been to receive timely notification of this? By identifying risk behaviour in a timely manner, it is possible to respond to the situation in a preventive manner. Then everyone benefits. And that’s what we strive for at BigBrother.