Security system focuses on rural crime

A team of young entrepreneurs has developed a real-time, remote area security system to help curb rising rural crime, which cost communities more than £40 million last year.

Developed over three years in consultation with Hampshire Police, TelemetriCop is a long-range, radio mesh networked, wireless security camera system designed to counter crime as it develops.

Managing director Hugo Stride said: “We designed TelemetriCop to address all the shortcomings of conventional CCTV for rural, remote area security.

“Most of all we wanted something capable of stopping a crime from happening there and then, rather than just supplying a photographic record of it after the event.”

Mr Stride said the technical challenge involved creation of a system that could communicate, without transmission costs, over great distances in areas where there would likely be no WiFi or mobile phone coverage.

“It needed to be self-powered, operate day and night and, so that people wouldn’t incur the expense of needing someone to look at a screen constantly, we wanted to use the latest image recognition techniques and provide an automated service with virtually no operating costs.”

The system operates on a licence-free UHF frequency.

The TelemetriCop camera is armed with a motion-activated sensor which triggers a photograph to be taken and a highly compressed image to be transmitted to a base station.

The image is then sent to a server and automatically passed through Telemetricor’s own image-recognition system which, using image filtration algorithms, analyses whether the information may be actionable.

In this way false alarms caused by, for example, wildlife, shadows or windblown foliage are generally avoided and information which the system deems to be of potential interest is sent to the user.

Any image that passes this filter is immediately relayed to an app which alerts the user and allows them to view it – on their smart phone and/or their personal computer via a secure web platform – and assess the potential threat.

The images can then be shared at the touch of a button with a preassigned response team and appropriate action then taken.

On average the time between the photograph being taken and the user receiving a potentially actionable image is just 60 seconds.

We wanted something capable of stopping a crime from happening there and then...

HUGO STRIDE