surveillance cameras linked to AI to detect theft, assault or accident

The system called DéjaView was set up in Seoul, it makes it possible to analyze images from surveillance cameras in real time to detect all kinds of events and reduce police intervention time.

Once again, reality catches up with fiction. In the movie Minority Reportwe imagined a world where crimes would be predicted and stopped before they took place. Here we are, a similar system has just been deployed in South Korea, in the fall of 2024. The objective is really to reduce crime. What is it about? The system called DéjaView was implemented in a district of Seoul, the capital. All the surveillance cameras there have been connected to artificial intelligence. This makes it possible to analyze their images in real time to detect all kinds of events: theft, an attack or an accident. This will reduce police intervention time.

But the system goes further. He crosses what he sees with a history of several years of crimes, offenses and accidents. As soon as it finds a similar set of conditions, it will send an alert to say: “Attention ! Go and see, because something might happen.”

The system warns a few minutes, a quarter of an hour at most, before an incident or crime. So we are still far from Minority Report where, three days before, we precisely give the name of the assassin, the victim and the time. There, the objective is rather to better organize surveillance on the ground, by updating the risks of crime in real time and in the process, to increase the number of people caught in flagrante delicto.

All this brings to mind the algorithmic video surveillance which created controversy in France, even if we are not at the level of Korea. In France, these are simply cameras capable of detecting weapons, crowd movements or abandoned luggage. But, even if the government repeats that there is no facial recognition, many are concerned about the development of a surveillance society, the biases that could be introduced into these systems and of course their reliability. Science fiction does not predict the future, it mainly alerts us to the problems that we will have to deal with.