Elevating Public Safety and Security with AI

Timing is everything when it comes to responding to critical situations such as emergencies. Yet, public safety agencies and security operators often face the challenge of sifting through vast amounts of data—often incomplete and in varied formats such as audio, video, written reports, and social media feeds—before they can formulate an appropriate response. 

The adoption of smart technologies such as AI could reduce response times for emergency services by 20-35%.^[1] Particularly, cities whose security systems are spread across police departments, firefighters and other agencies may benefit from AI that can detect complex patterns and connections between events, leading to improved incident response times.

Here at ST Engineering, we have developed customised solutions that leverage these transformative powers of AI to empower establishments to respond to incidents more effectively through enhanced real-time situational awareness.

Smart Speech-to-(Con)Text 

Emergency calls often suffer from poor audio quality, background noise, and come from distressed individuals who struggle to clearly describe the situation. The call operator is expected to decipher the situation, calm the caller, gather information, input it into reports, and quickly decide which agencies to involve. That is is a lot to process at once. 

Additionally, with our Automatic Speech Recognition engine, powered by advanced Natural Language Processing capabilities, can handle code-switching between vernaculars, even in noisy conditions, ensuring accurate information capture into the system.

Further, as the call operator addresses the caller and probes incident specifics, the system is simultaneously extracting details, such as historical call logs from the same timeframe and additional reports from the vicinity of the incident, for the operator, to provide greater context for any given call. These capabilities resultantly accelerate decision-making and reduce response time, streamlining call centre operations.

The Power of an Intelligent Overview 

Having a bird’s eye view can significantly enhance public safety and accelerate emergency response times, bringing together comprehensive situational awareness, accurate damage assessment and rapid decision-making.

Our solutions replace the costly and tedious task of manually reviewing vast amounts of video footage by performing real-time processing to generate detailed insights.

Our AGIL® Video Analytics Suite features an advanced video analytics platform and AI-powered engine for detecting pre-defined threats, tracking suspects, and providing real-time alerts. Built on an open, cloud-supported architecture, it integrates various video analytics engines on a single modular platform, making it future-ready to meet evolving operational requirements. With finely-tuned algorithms, it excels at security-related tasks such as intruder detection, license plate recognition, and object tracking, among others.

AGIL® Vision, our AI-powered searchable video intelligence solution, supports rapid, flexible natural language searches during unexpected situations. Security personnel can quickly locate specific assets, distinctive clothing, brand marks, and even observable human behaviours. This is particularly useful for crowd management to prevent emergencies and maintain public order.

Together, these capabilities provide crucial insights. For instance, in a fire, they can pinpoint the location and assess the severity by analysing fire’s size and characteristics. This enables emergency responders to be accurately directed to the scene, shortening response times and optimises resource deployment.

Making Sense of Multi-Modal Data

To empower key decision makers to make better, holistic decisions, our powerful rapid sensemaking engine, AGIL® Ops Hub, powered by AI and data analytics, weaves together multimodal data to produce a real-time picture of an ongoing situation and provides automated analysis. This is especially valuable in emergency services operation centres. 

Doing so, it can flag duplicated reports and provide a more accurate and comprehensive view of a particular incident. This saves time and resources for operators, preventing duplicate deployments to the same event.

AGIL Ops Hub even taps on social media feeds for additional information, offering insights that may not otherwise be captured in traditional channels. All of that information is then visualised on an intuitive dashboard, empowering operators to optimise critical decision-making. Today, this solution has already been deployed for our customers handling mission critical operations, validating its effectiveness in the real world, and reinforcing our status as a leading provider in public safety and security solutions.

Continuous Innovation of Cutting-Edge Capabilities

The time to embrace AI’s ability to push boundaries and unlock new possibilities is now. At least 65% of public safety agencies have already adopted AI for their operations, with a notable 77% of first responders supporting this trend.^[2]

As challenges in public safety and security evolve, so too will the need for more advanced tools. For instance, responding to growing concerns over digital deception, we’ve developed a suite of advanced AI-powered tools to counter the rapid and extensive spread of misinformation, expediting fact-checking and detecting multimodal deepfakes.

As we continue on our mission of solving real-world problems and improving lives, we’re dedicated to constantly enhancing our capabilities to meet future challenges.

^[1] Deloitte. (2024). Surveillance and predictive policing through AI

^[2] Police1. (2024, February 29). Survey highlights need for AI, Mobile Technology in public safety