Innovation Exchange challenge: Intelligent Surveillance Trigger

This challenge seeks to inform future capability development of novel approaches to overcome the challenge of providing an intelligent surveillance trigger of a positive identification of a person of interest. Ideally this would lead to significantly reduced human interaction, noting human-machine teaming will always be required for key decision making.

The surveillance trigger could be based off a database of information, for example facial recognition, a person’s gait, or other novel identification methods.  The benefits of intelligent and unsupervised learning could also be utilised to improve reliability.

The focus of the proposal should be on the unsupervised processing of surveillance information for a machine to intelligently provide a trigger or notification that a human in the loop or a UAV can act upon. The vehicle of delivery (i.e., UAV) is not the focus, though the technology developed will likely but not necessarily be used with a commercial UAV, so interoperability should be considered for future phases of work.

To further steer, several options could be considered:

• Positive identification could come from traditional image processing or deep learning techniques.
• Broader person identification techniques beyond facial recognition or other datasets beyond imagery.
• Utilising AI/ML algorithms to positively identify a person from available data sources.
• Edge processing to provide real-time information without the need to be cloud connected.
• The proposal should consider what data sets would be necessary to activate the trigger (be it captured imagery footage, open-source, synthetic etc). As this project is open to innovative methods.
• Thought should be given to future ethical and legal compliance implications.
• We will not be able to provide datasets, please consider in your proposal what training data could be used.

This challenge is open to all UK based academic institutions, UK registered start-ups, SMEs and Primes.

Collaborative proposals are encouraged to pool collective strengths to co-create a viable solution to this challenge.