In March 2003 Home Secretary, David Blunkett made a stunning announcement at the Wakefield Bureau of the national VIPER (Video Identification Parade Electronic Recording) project. “Its nice to be part of a government IT scheme that actually works!” he said as he was given a tour of the facility which has already revolutionised the way police ID parades are carried out. The site, which houses the supercomputer system capable of delivering the national video programme represents something of a triumph for its designers, the so-called VIPER’s nest from
Successful identity parades are an essential part of the fight against crime for the
Video id parades, which were given equal evidentiary weight as live line-ups in April 2002 when the PACE Codes were revised, offer distinct advantages. A virtual parade can be organised and delivered in just 30 minutes and costs just £150. With a database of clips of nearly 11,000 volunteers, even distinctive looking suspects for whom it would be almost impossible to find look-alikes in the proximity of a particular police station can be processed using VIPER.
It is not surprising, then, that abandonment rates have dropped substantially (reduced to just 10% in areas where VIPER has been in use). The national system is expected to save the Home Office £143million over the next five years. Perhaps more importantly, VIPER is expected to increase detection rates as identification can be organised and carried out while the suspect is still in custody. This not only prevents the suspect from absconding when called to appear in an id parade but witnesses are also more likely to provide accurate information while the incident is fresh in their minds.
What is VIPER
The VIPER system consists of a database of video clips linked to 32 editing suites all housed at a data centre in
Development of VIPER
The story of VIPER’S development began back in 1996 at the Video Unit of West Yorkshire Police in
Pat Prince, Head of the Video Unit, had put together the occasional video ID parade but found the process to be exceptionally laborious. Although the unit had built up a database of several hundred clips of volunteers which could be used in a video line-up, these were not indexed as such and could be referenced only by browsing a book of still images. Moreover, the selected clips could be retrieved and edited only in a linear fashion using a traditional tape based editing system. Anyone who has prepared a bespoke VHS cassette from pre-recorded footage using two VTRs will recognise the painstaking process of fast forwarding to locate a particular clip and then recording it to the other tape. Using this method it could take many hours for Pat to prepare an 8/9 clip video id parade.
In late 1996, the purchase of a non-linear video edit suite provided the first real breakthrough. Using the FAST Video Machine system Pat was able to search and retrieve clips in a fraction of the time. The FAST Video Machine system was one of the most successful products in the first generation of PC-based edit suites and lasted the unit approximately four years. During this time it was connected to probably the largest amount of storage in use on that system, anywhere in the world.
We then turned our attention to the delivery system, which was, at that stage, carried out by physically transporting a VHS cassette featuring the video id parade using a courier or police pursuit car. Pat was aware that, if we could prepare and deliver the video in, say, less than three hours, the ID parade could be performed while the suspect was still in custody and that immediacy had a number of benefits.
I set about working on a digital solution which would allow the virtual line-up to be transmitted down a telephone line. We looked at various video capture cards but were mindful of the importance of quality. We had to ensure that the ID parade could not be challenged on technical grounds in court.
The launch of the FAST AV Master video card in 1997 provided the solution. FAST’s accompanying edit suite also speeded up the edit process. However, while the digital video solution had solved the problem of edit times, it had created another in terms of file sizes. Each video clip was about 50MB; even using an ISDN2 line at 128KB/sec it would take hours to transmit a whole id parade. What’s more, connectivity problems meant that the whole download could fail if one of the connections was interrupted at any time. We decided to call on the expertise of Matek Business Systems, one of the early partners in the development of the system, who provided a multiplexing solution which improved connectivity.
In 1998 a site trial was conducted at a police station in
As its popularity increased, the original equipment and system architecture started to creak under the strain. Due to the sheer volume of data being processed, certain elements were displaying signs of fatigue. The FAST Video Machine suite and its proprietary 180GB hard drive system was replaced by the state-of-the-art Pinnacle silver edit suite, which used advanced MPEG2 compression. This technology offered improved picture quality, whilst reducing the file sizes of the captured video by over 50%.
The next significant development occurred with the introduction of the Canopus Amber card in 2000 – this captured video as mpegs rather than mjpegs. It also further reduced the file sizes by 50% and thus improved transmission speeds accordingly. We also knew that in theory the MPEG2 files created by the Amber should work with the source edit files in the silver edit suite. We put that theory into practice with the help of Pinnacle Systems in
At last we were able to create a system with file compatibility right from capture at the police station, through the edit process and onto DVD (also MPEG2) for the final viewing of the parade.
The force wide trial had proved the VIPER system as a concept and official acknowledgment came with the announcement in early 2002 that the Home Office was granting £7.6 million funding for a national VIPER system. The programme was linked to the government’s Street Robbery Initiative. The VIPER system would be rolled out to at least seven stations in ten robbery hotspots in the
The ramifications, in terms of scale, meant that I needed to call in technical expertise in storage and file delivery. This came in the form of Sagitta, a leading company in storage technology. Without a major breakthrough in digital video compression, and having discounted the feasibility of video streaming, we had to find a way to manage the massive amounts of data processing required to edit video ID parades on a national system.
At an exhibition in
In May 2002 Sagitta starting work building a fully scaled pre-stage VIPER system at their premises in Havant which consisted of 32 edit suites built, installed and configured by Quadrant. In just five months the national VIPER system was delivered to a new site in
Since April 2002 over 15,000 video ID parades have been carried out using VIPER and the system now prepares over 80 video ID parades every day to 13 police forces and there are orders in the pipeline for 20 new units. The original system, which runs on IBM xSeries Linux processors and ‘Intellistations’ for video editing, plus software and services from Sagitta, cost about £1.3m. The next stage is to develop a National Video Identification System [NVIS] in which VIPER will be linked to other identification systems such as DNA, digital fingerprints, facial and iris recognition, which are held in different databases, and make the information accessible to police on the move.
How VIPER works
Suspects are filmed in a VIPER video ID suite in a police station. They are asked to face forward and turn their heads to either side. Thirty seconds of footage of the suspect’s head and shoulders is recorded and transmitted via an IP network to the national VIPER Bureau. There it is edited down to a 15-second clip by one of the 20 editors located in the
Meanwhile, the suspect and his solicitor are invited to choose 8/9 candidates from an initial selection of still images indexed by various attributes and features (such as hair colour, ethnic background, skin colour and age) and created by entering a general description of the suspect. The selection is forwarded to the editors in
Andy Hogben is the national sales manager of Quadrant Visual Solutions, a Nottingham-based company which provides state-of-the-art audio-visual and communications solutions to commerce and industry.
a.hogben@quadrantsolutions.com
