Adrian, Georgia is a picturesque Southern town of about 600 people. Around 160 miles from Atlanta, it’s not exactly a big-city hotbed of crime – it has a part-time police staff of just two.
But Adrian wasn’t without the kinds of drug and petty crimes seen in every community, including drive-offs without paying from the local gas station. In 2021, Police Chief Kyle Strickland set out to do something about them.
“I was looking for a solution to kind of keep up with what tags were in what area, what vehicles came through,” Strickland recalled. “We needed another set of eyes out there.”
The solution Strickland found – not just LPR cameras but a comprehensive AI-based vehicle recognition system – got a quick handle on the drive-off problem: In roughly a year, it helped Adrian’s small PD resolve 23 such incidents.
Most, it turned out, were unintentional. But without the extra vigilance, those simple errors – amounting to hundreds of dollars for a small-town business – might have gone uncorrected.
“Had it not been for that,” Strickland said, “[we’d have only had] a general description of the vehicle, a general direction of travel, a general time. We’d go back, look and just start an investigation from there.”
‘THE RELIEF WAS PRICELESS’
With a missing person, that can be even harder, and the stakes are definitely higher. But the same tool Adrian police used to solve their gas drive-off issue paid off in a much bigger way when it helped resolve such a case just a few months later.
A senior with cognitive memory impairment went missing, and law enforcement throughout the region went on alert. Adrian police checked their system for any sightings. They found a hit and shared the resulting image with surrounding colleagues and on social media. Within three hours, the missing person was located in Savannah and ultimately returned home safely.
“Without the technology,” said Strickland, “we absolutely wouldn’t have found him as quickly as we did, or maybe even found him at all. Saving this one life has made the system worth every bit of the investment. The relief on the family’s face when we delivered him safely home was priceless.”
MAKE THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE
In both of these cases, the key technology used by Adrian police was Q Shield, an AI-powered, machine-vision vehicle recognition system (VRS) from omniQ that recently came to the U.S. market following success in numerous venues overseas. Based in Utah, omniQ is a leader in computerized and machine vision image-processing solutions.
Driven by a constantly building intelligence and advanced decision-making algorithms that mimic the neural networks of the human brain, Q Shield dramatically expands the capabilities of law enforcement, providing not only uninterrupted visibility but sophisticated analysis, risk identification and automated enforcement that simplifies operations, improves safety and boosts revenue.
“We believe in machine vision technology,” said the company’s CEO, Shai Lustgarten. “We believe in making the invisible visible by making data out of images. Then we take those images and, depending on the use case, create automatic actions from them.”
With Q Shield those images come from 24/7 monitoring by vision sensors in key locations: intersections, schools, important buildings, etc. These capture vehicles’ license plates, makes, models and colors and compare them instantly against local and national hotlists. The system can issue real-time alerts around a range of predetermined parameters, including location, speed, time, and full or partial plate numbers. It integrates with databases like those of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and local computer-aided dispatch systems while meeting all CJIS security requirements.
Q Shield’s strength lies in getting smarter all the time. Nationally it now has more than 7,000 vision sensors in operation. This helps inform constant system learning and build ever-greater accuracy in recognizing objects and activities.
“What we do is train the models,” said John Whiteman, omniQ’s executive director of sales. “The model is blank to begin, and we can take images of anything – generally it’s vehicles and license plates – and we train the model over and over again to recognize the object. So the algorithm gets smarter and smarter the more times it’s shown the object, to the point where it’s 99.9% effective.”
Q Shield has racked up a number of early successes since coming to the States, helping find missing persons, recover stolen vehicles and enforce violations. Besides vehicles and individuals of interest, it can also detect – and generate automatic citations for – violations like uninsured and unregistered vehicles.
Some of Q Shield’s other successes include:
- Just weeks after the system’s launch in Adrian, a man went missing in a neighboring county. Authorities there reached out, and Adrian police checked to see if he’d passed through. They found a hit, and for four days the image of his car they pulled was the key image circulated nationally as the search continued. During that time Strickland periodically rechecked to make sure the subject hadn’t passed back his way. “That [was] instrumental in that investigation,” he noted, and potentially useful in others as well. “[It’s] really good for us to be able to investigate if there’s a missing person or a child abduction or anything along those lines,” he added. “We can go back and look, see if they’ve come through here.”
- In Watkinsville, Georgia, the system identified a stolen car containing four young men who were en route to rob a gun store. Police reacted quickly and corralled the group before any additional harm was done.
- In 2021 port authorities in Israel selected Q Shield and its facial-recognition abilities to secure the port of Ashdod. It’s the nation’s largest seaport, with an annual cargo volume of more than 20 million tons.
- omniQ and Q Shield also protects sensitive military sites in several international locations, as well as key border segments.
NEWFOUND MONEY
A novel approach to financing lets smaller or financially pressed jurisdictions procure Q Shield via a revenue-sharing arrangement. Basically, omniQ provides the system first, then it’s paid off through a percentage of the revenue it produces.
“When there’s a match to one of the lists provided by the municipality of, say, uninsured or unregistered motorists, the local police department sends it to us and says, ‘We have a match here and want you to commence an enforcement activity,’” explained Whiteman. “We then issue a citation letter along with a fine from our offices in Salt Lake City. There’s a web portal where people can go to pay or dispute the infraction. And as we collect the money, we forward it back to the municipality. For them it’s newfound money, because they’ve never received funds for these types of infractions.”
While safety is the primary benefit of this mechanism, it can also provide a solid revenue stream that’s not subject to the whims of a budget process.
Beyond Q Shield, omniQ provides a range of complementary smart parking and “safe city” technologies, as well as solutions in supply chain automation. For public safety, integrating such additional capabilities can yield operations that are more streamlined and ultimately productive.
“There are lots of companies that work with stolen vehicles and BOLO lists. Our edge was developing a cloud-based solution for unregistered and uninsured vehicles and issuing citations and collecting money from people,” said Whiteman. “In addition, many of these same municipalities have enforcement programs related to things like curb management, where they’re dealing with third parties, not traditional LPR companies. They’re dealing with partners that can only bring the enforcement: They have vehicles that drive around, they have LPR sensors, they issue citations, they collect the money.
“In our case, we bring that entire portfolio under one roof. And they can use as little as a camera on a street corner or all the way up to having cameras on their police vehicles, issuing citations for overstays at meters, parking enforcement programs, etc. And going a step further, once you do all of that, then issuing the citation to the right person and having a web portal where anybody can go in, see their citation and pay it is unique. A lot of companies do some of those things, but only omniQ brings all of that together.”
For more information, visit omniQ.com.
