Boffins work to find the ‘gun look’ (From Surrey Comet)

Boffins work to find the ‘gun look’

8:36am Sunday 1st April 2007 in News

Experts from Kingston University are well on their way to discovering an answer to rising gun crime, with their plans for weapon-detecting CCTV.

The university's digital imaging research centre is developing a CCTV system which automatically scans footage for tell-tale signs that might indicate a person was carrying a firearm and then alerts the system operator.

Dr Jean-Christophe Nebel of Kingston University, who is working on the project, said: "The penalty for carrying a gun is so high that people won't just carry it as a fashion accessory. You carry it if you are about to use it. For that reason it is something very usual for you and your emotional state to be altered."

Dr Nebel compared the situation with when you buy a new mobile phone. He said: "When you first have it you check your pockets for it all the time. After a couple of weeks it becomes part of you so you don't notice it anymore. In my understanding this is the situation with knives these days, but guns are still quite rare."

To capture the warning signs, psychologists are studying genuine CCTV footage of people carrying hidden weapons to examine their demeanour in the lead-up to gun-associated crime. Posture, movement and eye contact with cameras will all be scrutinised. Once the information has been analysed, it will be passed to digital imaging experts at Kingston and Loughborough, who have been charged with developing the identification software.

Dr Nebel said the research was timely, given the recent spate of shootings, including 16-year-old James Smartt-Ford from New Malden who was shot dead at Streatham Ice Rink. He said: "There have been so many people killed in London recently that hopefully it's nice to see people doing something about it that isn't just more police on the streets."

With a grant of £186,590 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Dr Nebel and Dr Dimitrios Makris from Kingston are working on the three-year Multi-Environment Deployable Universal Software Application (Medusa) project, backed by the Metropolitan Police and the Firearms Partners Group.