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September 2011

Baytown PD Uses Video Forensics to Quickly Share Still Images with Officers on Patrol

About Baytown, Texas

Baytown is in the Gulf Coast region of Texas, on the northern shore of Galveston Bay 22 miles east of Houston. Baytown was officially founded on January 24, 1948 encompassing the towns of East Baytown, Goose Creek and Pelly. Baytown has a total area of 33.2 square miles, with an estimated population of 78,311, as of 2006. Oil is big business in the city, and Amoco, Exxon-Mobil, Bayer (petrochemical products) and Chevron Phillips are the anchors of the business community.

The mission of the Baytown Police Department (PD) is to enhance the quality of life in the city of Baytown by working cooperatively with the citizens within the framework of the U.S. Constitution by enforcing the laws, educating the public, preserving the peace, reducing citizen apprehension and providing a safe environment for the community by vigorously eliminating the criminal element. As a result, Baytown enjoys a low rate of crime. As of 2010, the property crime rate in the community is 4.6 percent and the violent crime rate is 0.5 percent.

The Challenge

The police department is comprised of about 150 sworn officers and about 50 support personnel. For Baytown PD Crime Scene Detective John F. Lunsford, one of his duties is to manage video forensics, the video image enhancement technology designed for the needs of law enforcement.

From local grocery stores and pharmacies, to banks and office complexes, video cameras are becoming commonplace in Baytown. As a result, crime scene video is becoming an increasingly available source of evidence as crimes are captured on analog video tape and from closed circuit television systems, cell phone cameras and other forms of digital security and surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, in many cases the video is grainy, fuzzy, damaged, shaky, or poorly exposed, making it difficult to identify suspects or other clues including apparel logos, tattoos and license plates.

“We had been using an outdated system and realized it couldn’t enhance all the video we were getting in,” said Detective Lunsford.

Further, many of these videos are multiplexed, with several camera views recorded into a single playback stream. Complicating this more for investigators, different video security and surveillance systems use a variety of proprietary digital file formats.

Baytown PD purchased VideoFOCUS Pro from Salient Stills to capture video data directly from proprietary security system movie players, while the video is played. VideoFOCUS Pro can then create high resolution still images and videos that can be used to identify suspects and generate leads.

“VideoFOCUS Pro lets us play video from proprietary sources and capture it, so that we can enhance it further back in the office,” said Detective Lunsford.

The Result

“Before, it would take a few days to get stills from video,” said Detective Lunsford. “With VideoFOCUS Pro we can do it within an hour, which can be critical for serious crimes.”

VideoFOCUS has dramatically improved the Baytown PD’s ability to capture and export digital video, work with proprietary video data formats from security systems, and print still images. Investigators can quickly import an extensive range of digital video recorder file types including .MPG, .WMF and .ASF files, and can export as .MOV, .AVI and .WMF files for playback through the popular Windows Media Player and Apple QuickTime video players.

“One of my favorite features is to make still images from video and immediately send them to patrol,” said Detective Lunsford. “It feels good when we can quickly identify a suspect, get them to confess and clear up cases.”

The Solution

Using innovative image processing algorithms, Salient Stills’ VideoFOCUS Pro processes still and video surveillance data, while preserving the integrity of the evidence.

“We do use VideoFOCUS Pro frequently,” said Detective Lunsford. “It is a great tool which has helped us solve crimes. We run the video frame by frame about half the time and then send stills out to patrol. And about 30 percent of the time, they know right away who the suspect is.”

Over the past year, the Baytown PD has used VideoFOCUS Pro on about 50 cases, or about once per week.

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