Police officers and security personnel have access to portable video and audio devices, and have access to recordings from close circuit television (“CCTV”) and other security cameras. Often video recorders are present in patrol cars to record incidents, and police officers often bring video cameras to incidents.
The present ubiquity of mobile devices with video, still, and audio capture adds to the availability of multimedia resources to officers. The public often provides multimedia to police authorities. Alternatively, the public posts multimedia to social networks or public locations on the Internet, which the police later obtain. Often the policemen themselves carry personal devices such as smart-phones, to capture yet more multimedia files.
However, the large amount of security multimedia data is often haphazardly stored, and is not necessarily accessible to officers. Files may be stored associated with a particular case identifier, but not cross-referenced or accessed in contexts other than the case. For files provided by the public, or from private sources, the files might not be indexed, and may represent a wide range of incompatible file formats. In general, multimedia files are available long after the incident, and accessed when the context is not in the officer's mind.
The result is a large amount of security multimedia data that is not optimally available to officers for analysis. Tools to assist in analysis are not available. Accordingly, there is an opportunity to optimize capture and utilization of multimedia files by providing security personnel with analysis and correlation tools for these assets.