Video surveillance tech helps recover $1 mn Russian painting

New Delhi: Facial recognition video technology has led to recovery of a million dollar painting, stolen from an art gallery in Moscow, and the thief’s arrest, according to authorities in Moscow, the Russian capital. Dmitri Golovin, head of the Urban Video Surveillance Division of the Moscow government’s Department of Information Technologies, told IANS in an e-mail interview about the process of recovery of ‘Ai-Petri’, a painting by Arkhip Kuindzhi, one of Russia’s noted landscape painters. The theft of the painting last month was widely reported in the international media.

“The painting was located within eight hours of being stolen from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow with the help of smart city technologies deployed in the capital,” Golovin said. “The thief, Denis Chupikov, was tracked down through the surveillance videos,” he said. According to Golovin, Moscow’s smart city and safe city solutions comprise video surveillance system across the capital. Golovin said 70 per cent of crimes in Moscow are investigated using a video surveillance system. “To date more than 100,000 entrances of apartment buildings, about 20,000 courtyards and over 3,500 public places have been equipped with cameras,” he said. The deployment of video analytics to automatically review what the cameras record, including facial recognition, began in Moscow last year.

“At present, the facial recognition system has been implemented for 1,500 video streams and we are planning to increase it to 105,000, that is, to cover all the cameras in the areas of surveillance,” Golovin said. (IANS)

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