PNNL Contributes to a Safe World Cup
As crowds gathered in stadiums around the nation for the FIFA World Cup competition, scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) were among the specialists keeping them safe from harm.
Crowd security at stadiums in Seattle, Washington, and in Santa Clara, California, were enhanced with an immersive imaging system that enables a 360-degree view, with the notable capability to track specific items or persons of interest in rapidly changing, hectic settings.
“This is part of what makes working at a national laboratory so exciting—one day you’re doing research about advanced video analytics and the next you’re applying that security technology at the World Cup,” said Nick Betzsold, a PNNL data scientist who specializes in security screening and analytics for public safety.
Betzsold and team have worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and industry partner Consolidated Resource Imaging, LLC (CRI) to implement the system, first at the Super Bowl and recently at the World Cup.
The 360-degree immersive imaging system, called Guardian-iiS (pronounced Guardian Eyes), provides a new tool for security specialists to secure an event. The system stitches together imagery from multiple cameras of differing focal lengths, providing a high-resolution 360-degree field of view. Artificial intelligence specially trained for crowd behavior monitoring, object detection, and object tracking is layered on top of the immense video dataset. These insights are fed into stadium security operations centers—all in real time thanks to PNNL’s long-standing ability to handle large amounts of data.
“Tracking objects of interest through densely populated environments like a stadium can be challenging,” said Betzsold. “With this technology, we are better able to maintain chain of custody, understanding where the objects of interest came from and predicting what might happen next.”
Compared to typical imaging systems like closed-circuit television, the Guardian-iiS user interface allows multiple operators to simultaneously access and track an object of interest in footage at full resolution, at all times. The system’s fine resolution yields a close-up view of objects from hundreds of feet away. With multiple cameras, objects that are sometimes obscured or hidden from view can be visible to security specialists.
For example, the system detects a person suspiciously placing a backpack on the ground. A security officer alerted to this event can access the footage to track the backpack backward and forward in time to learn where the person came from and predict where they might be going, allowing additional resources to be dispatched to the scene. Simultaneously, the system’s enhanced analytics could assess the behavior of a crowd near a barricade in a totally different region of the field of view. Should the crowd’s behavior become agitated, security officers can be alerted to take action to address this separate event.
“Through the Guardian-iiS user interface, this type of activity can all happen simultaneously and quickly. Specialized algorithms keep the data and video feeds flowing smoothly among the multiple operators working an event,” Betzsold said.
The system was originally developed in a partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory and PNNL. MIT licensed the technology to CRI in 2017, and PNNL continued to partner with CRI to develop the video analytics that now underlie the system.
To learn more, see the DHS S&T article, Securing the World Cup. For a more in-depth look at Guardian-iiS, see the DHS article Leveling the Playing Field at the Big Game that describes testing and evaluation of the system by Betzsold and the PNNL team at the Super Bowl.
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