Driven by growing security concerns arising from increasing terrorist attacks, racial and ethnic disturbances, organised civil unrest, random violence, riots, burglary and physical assaults, the global market for the face and voice biometric technologies is projected to reach US$2.9 billion by the year 2018.
Across Europe, governments and law enforcement agencies are increasingly impotent in their ability to combat a deterioration in public safety. The economic crisis that is increasingly fueling public disorder is also paralysing our police and intelligence agencies with draconian budget cuts.
Having previously invested heavily in infrastructure, these agencies have at their disposal huge volumes of data in the form of media, but have no way to unlock the potential intelligence bonanza it contains. Vast sums are being spent allocating experienced and expensive human capital to rote tasks of watching countless of hours of media in the hope of randomly finding useful information.
A solution to automate this processing to quickly and efficiently unlock actionable intelligence from this staggering amount of data is required. The potential to improve public safety whilst simultaneously enabling the more efficient use of our public finances is huge.