The police are using powerful AI to track the looters from October 17.

In the aftermath of the looting on October 17 and 18, the police’s priority was to track down and find the looters and vandals. Tools were made available to them, including a particular software tool developed by Orasio.It is a ChatGPT-style AI that makes it possible to analyze the thousands of hours of footage gathered by the police.

The police has a huge amount of footage of the looting, but not enough manpower to analyze it

Between CCTV footage, videos posted on social media, and the video-sharing platform, the police has many images of the looting. However, time is of the essence: the looters in question may take advantage of this to conceal their thefts or hide more effectively. Indeed, Vinted and Leboncoin are flooded with listings for stolen products. Although arrests have already begun, many perpetrators still need to be identified. Investigators can rely on an AI tool commercialized by the French startup Orasio. This AI had already been tested by the city of Cannes and was introduced at the Ministry of the Interior last June.

This artificial intelligence makes it possible to analyze large volumes of images in order to detect anomalous situations, find people or vehicles. This can help investigators reconstruct a journey. Specifically, a user can enter a text query, for example a description of what someone is wearing, a type of vehicle, etc.

Orasio’s tool then identifies the matching video sequences in the database of videos provided to it. There is therefore no need to watch endless videos on a loop to find a suspect.A task made all the more difficult because most of the looters were dressed entirely in black and, for the most part, masked.

No facial recognition, however, with this AI tool

But there is no reason for Florian Fournier, president and co-founder of Orasio, to worry: “You just need to make a query as you would in ChatGPT, for example, write, ‘I am looking for an individual who was wearing a black hood, a green Adidas backpack and white Nike shoes’,” he explained to 20 Minutes. Once this individual has been identified, he can be found in all the other videos in which he appears. Other limitations remain: image quality, camera angle, lighting, various obstacles or simply the quality of the queries.

Florian Fournier is confident: his tool does not perform facial recognition. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin has nevertheless assured that this technology would be used to compare the videos with the Criminal Records Processing (TAJ) database. It can be assumed that another tool, other than Orasio’s, will be used for this. Let us recall that facial recognition remains prohibited in France, except in certain exceptional cases governed by the AI Act and Article 9 of the GDPR.

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Source: 20 Minutes