really smart cameras?

Around the Olympic sites this summer… 185 cameras from the Paris police headquarters, aided by artificial intelligence software: cityvision, scrutinized behavior to identify potential dangers in real time: pfor example, an abandoned object, an outbreak of fire or a crowd movement.

A technology developed by a French company: Wintics. We met them a few months ago. One of the co-founders then praised the precision of his software: “The algorithm was taught to distinguish all moving objects in public space. We distinguish them all to be able to go into the analysis as finely as possible. Our accuracy is always between 95 and 97%“, explains Matthias Houllier, co-founder of Wintics.

But the first tests proved inconclusive, notably during a concert by the group Depeche Mode in Bercy in March 2024…Senators who attended the experiment delivered their conclusions in a report:

“We understood (…) that the tool was not working. The Olympic Games will offer an additional field of experimentation, but in no case is there a means of security”.

“There were false positives. For example, artificial intelligence identifies weapons where there are none”

Anonymous source

at the Eye of 8 p.m.

When contacted, the company that develops the software maintains that its results are very promising. Since then, the technology has been deployed on the Olympic sites and in Parisian transport with several hundred cameras equipped. But according to a source who attended the experiment, there would still be malfunctions:“There were false positives. For example, artificial intelligence identifies weapons where none exist”, she tells us on condition of anonymity.

A few days ago, the Paris police chief, Laurent Nuñez was nevertheless very satisfied. He wants algorithmic video surveillance to be perpetuated: “On a personal level, and this is the proposal that we are going to push: we are very favorable to it“, he declared in the law committee of the National Assembly.

An eagerness which annoys the members of the committee responsible for evaluating this experiment. It is up to them to take stock of the use of smart cameras. And they are far from sharing the enthusiasm of the police: “Without betraying anything, there is no reason to jump to the ceiling and say ‘it’s great, it’s a tool that poses no problem, everything is fine’. We are not there at all, says Jérôme Durain, senator from Saône-et-Loire and member of the evaluation committee. I find that it fuels the idea that when we launch an experiment it will be part of the law anyway and we entertain the gallery with an evaluation committee. I think we need a little seriousness: either we evaluate or we don’t evaluate, but we don’t have time to waste on instances that would serve no purpose.”