A police officer equipped with Taser's Axon Flex body camera (Photo by George Frey/Getty Images) Business is booming in the bodycam industry. Police forces across the United States are equipping more of their officers with cameras to gather more information out in the field. But with all that footage comes a tsunami of data that's becoming increasingly difficult to sift through. Taser International, one of the largest manufacturers of police bodycams, wants to bring some of the latest artificial intelligence techniques to make sense of all that footage. On Thursday, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company said it's making two acquisitions to up its game in the area. Taser is acquiring Dextro, a startup developing image recognition algorithms for video, and the computer vision team part of Fossil Group-owned Misfit. Taser didn't reveal financial terms of the two acquisitions. The acquisitions will bring around 20 employees into Taser to form a new group called Axon AI. The group will develop services that will give police departments the ability to automatically categorize and analyze the video coming in and make it all searchable. The new AI service will be offered alongside Taser's cloud storage service, Evidence.com. "Police are drowning in pools of footage that's supposed to be helping them," said Dextro cofounder and CEO David Luan in an interview. "It's an incredible challenge dealing with that amount of data." Taser said it has more than 5.2 petabytes of video data stored on its servers. With the acquisition of New York-based startup Dextro, Taser is getting talent familiar with some of the hottest AI techniques. Founded in 2013, Dextro uses a branch of AI called deep learning -- also known as deep neural nets -- that mimic the structure of the brain to recognize patterns in data. Deep learning has taken the entire tech industry by storm and is showing unprecedented accuracy in areas likes image and speech recognition. Dextro had raised only a small seed round of $1.7 million before the acquisition, but had started working with customers like Mic.com and some police forces to analyze their video data. Acquisition talks between Taser and Dextro started after the two companies met each other at a roundtable on the topic of police bodycams, Luan said. Luan said Dextro's software can help identify three areas that appear on video: objects (like vehicles or weapons), places (like indoors, outdoors or even beaches) and actions (such as traffic stops or foot chases). Although the growing number of police bodycams is partly intended to improve police accountability, the potential misuse of more advanced video analytics techniques is ripe for abuse, said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "We support bodycams on the condition that they serve as an affective police oversight tool and not as yet another set of government surveillance cameras," Stanley said. "The storing of video and running analytics on it does not strike the right balance between privacy, oversight and usefulness to the police." Stanley said that camera footage coming off these cameras should essentially be put into a black hole and never see the light of day unless there's a complaint filed against an officer or there's a use of force. And after the footage is six months old, it should be erased, Stanley said. By making all this footage automatically searchable, that information can be easily surfaced at any time. A concern for Stanley is applying facial recognition to the video analysis. "One of the big fears is that these cameras become roving surveillance cameras,” Stanley said. “We could have 30,000 officers with these cameras and a list of suspected terrorist with their photos and now everybody who bears a passing resemblance is getting stopped by every police officer who enters their field of vision. I don’t think most Americans want to live in a world like that.” But Luan insists that the company isn't using facial recognition and isn't even in the process of developing those capabilities. Instead, Luan said he's working on actually developing techniques to automatically blur the faces captured on police video. Ultimately, it's hard to tell how most police forces currently use bodycams, and how they might use AI systems in the future to better understand the footage. Stanley said there are police forces with good bodycam policies in place, but then there are others who appear to have little interest in using the cameras to improve police transparency -- no control, for example, over when the cameras should be turned on or off. In those cases, "they're basically serving the surveillance interests of the police," Stanley said.
Taser International, a leading manufacturer of police bodycams, wants to use artificial intelligence to interpret the data obtained by such devices. The company announced on Thursday that it is acquiring image recognition start-up, Dextro, and the computer vision section of Fossil Group’s Jay Stanley. Dextro uses “deep learning,” which is revolutionising image and speech recognition. The move has raised concerns about privacy and accountability. Misfit of the American Civil Liberties Union said that bodycams could become “roving surveillance cameras”.