International. The Casino Gran Madrid-Colón, in the Spanish capital, adopted a facial recognition system based on Axis Communications cameras to reinforce the work of physiognomists in the control of gambling.
The place, which receives 700,000 visitors each year, reduced by less than half the time needed to identify a person inside a casino, even at the last minute and on days of maximum influx of public.
Decreasing the time spent identifying a person is a long-standing demand of security departments. We had been trying for many years to implement a solution that would allow us to reduce the time to identify a person in a casino," says Ángel Pérez Alcarria, Director of Security at the Gran Madrid Group. "Thanks to the advancement of IP video technology and the increased reliability of facial recognition systems based on video analytics, this demand has become possible today."
Currently the level of reliability of facial recognition systems based on video analysis is over 95%. The Video Surveillance solution BioSurveillance, from the company Herta Security, for example, detects multiple faces in real time, facilitates the management of users at any time and even allows training the system through live video capture.
Thanks to the advice of Sensorvídeo, a partner of Axis, the Casino Gran Madrid-Colón adopted three AXIS Q1604 cameras whose features are especially suitable for facial recognition thanks to their wide dynamic range (WDR) that facilitates the identification even in backlight conditions or the presence in the scene of bright light sources.
Subjects can be incorporated into the system through photographs and / or video recorded or in real time and works correctly even with partial concealment of the face, use of lenses, presence of shadows, and with moderate rotations of the face. The system is also composed of 261 other AXIS HD or Full HD cameras, even with "Lightfinder" technology for displaying color images in the dark.
The uses of the system are multiple: it covers the areas of safety and prevents occupational risks. For this, it has outdoor cameras that allow you to control the entire perimeter, at the entrances for access control and in the exclusive areas for staff, all centrally connected for remote surveillance.
At the level of game control, the system is used both for the control of procedures and as a tool to give transparency. Every half each day about 40 plays are reviewed, 12 of them based on customer complaints. In the latter case, they accompany the player to one of the control rooms and the images of the play about which there are doubts are reviewed together. Thus the video acts as an arbitrator and allows to resolve any type of incident. In relation to the use of images, 80% work on real-time video and 20% on recordings.
"A casino is a demanding environment for the video surveillance system, however some of the features of Axis Communications cameras, such as Lightfinder technology, and HD and Megapixel resolutions allow us to provide an image quality that represents a significant quality leap over the possibilities of the cameras we used until now, " commented the Director of Security of the Gran Madrid Group, Ángel Pérez Alcarria.
