Oosto brings facial recognition to Australian Turf Club’s CCTV system

Israel-based Oosto has revealed details about a deployment of its facial recognition software to enhance security and identify VIPs at the Australian Turf Club (ATC).

The collaboration also included help by security consulting firm partner Quorum Security.

“We were lucky enough to come on board with the Australian Turf Club in 2015,” says Matthew Brooks, senior project Manager at Quorum Security, as shown in a video on the collaboration. “We’re working closely with the security team on their CCTV systems. We’ve been looking at new technologies and investigating different options with them and supporting them since.”

Prior to the partnership with Oosto, the club reportedly needed a system that could identify known offenders and self-excluded gaming patrons across multiple entries and exit points, making relying on the human eye or memory alone challenging.

“Some of the challenges we faced were identifying people that had been either barred from the site or had been causing trouble and actually being able to recognise them again at another time, either here or one of our other race courses,” says Gary Colston, ATC’s head of security and access.

These pain points have traditionally been very hard to solve by security guards that need to remember faces, according to Oosto’s Regional Head of Sales Eric Yang.

“Therefore it is absolutely crucial to deploy a leading edge technology to help them find individuals a lot quicker than the traditional ways,” Yang adds.

Further, the Oosto OnWatch solution enabled ATC to retain its CCTV infrastructure, making deployment easier and less expensive.

“We could use our existing cameras and our setup,” Colston says. “We didn’t have to invest in a bunch of brand new cameras, or a massive amount of servers and things like that, so it was easier for us to implement it on our system.”

Since the biometric solution was deployed, Yang said the rate of detection of possible threats has significantly improved.

“Having a photo of a patron loaded in the system to have them in search and find where they have been historically, rather than only being searched from that point onwards has been a key differentiation. And we’re very happy to see our product being rolled out here to its best use.”

The case study on the partnership with ATC and Quorum Security comes weeks after Oosto published a report highlighting the limitations of the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

More recently, the company’s VP Engineering Moshe Ofry penned a guest post on facial blindness in relation to face biometrics.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  cctv  |  criminal ID  |  facial recognition  |  Oosto