Safety in numbers, SLATE Crowd Monitoring and Alerts
Createc employs a different approach to crowd monitoring by offering a system that can monitor multiple events
Challenge
Crowded spaces, such as shopping centres, sports stadia and entertainment venues are challenging to monitor. Under a themed market competition, the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) required innovators to propose ideas using sensing techniques, treating the crowd as a potential sensor, to reduce the threat from potential terrorist attacks in public spaces. Createc was funded £283,407 to further investigate the potential for SLATE-CMA (Crowd Monitoring and Alerts), a new monitoring approach, to improve crowd resilience.
Solution
Exploiting Createc’s vast experience of the very latest sensor technology, imaging applications and software approaches, the SLATE-CMA is now demonstrating its potential application. SLATE-CMA employs a different approach to crowd monitoring by offering a system that can monitor multiple events simultaneously and alert the operators to those events it has predicted need attention.
Createc combines two key innovations:
- A laser based tracking system which accurately captures crowd data including size and speed.
- A machine learning approach to identify changes in crowd patterns to alert staff at events.
Benefits
The system will offer: Anonymous data collection so that individuals cannot be identified, this protects the public and the user from data protection issues.
The system would be installed and operated by the venue owners to manage the day to day running of a facility.
Pete Rodgers, Project Lead, said:
The funding and support from DASA has meant we have been able to develop our crowd monitoring technology and deploy in a real world case study, allowing us to demonstrate to the end users.
Next Step
SLATE-CMA would like to build relationships with potential partners such as event organisers and venue owners and discover opportunities to trial and test the system for further exploitation.
Contact
Pete Rodgers, pete.rodgers@createc.co.uk