Investigating by geopositioning people, vehicles and objects

Locate and track suspects visually, on an interactive map

The advanced geopositioning functions in Intelion help locating all of the analyzed and ingested information on an interactive map to get the best possible overview of the location, movements of suspects and interactions between them.

Working on a map while investigating a case is a much more intuitive experience, especially when trying to link different suspects by seeing their movements together, or finding out the main activity zones where they spend most of the time. Intelion provides an intuitive visual interface that helps speeding up investigations.

Geographic Information System

A GIS, Geographic Information System connects data to a map, integrating location data (where things are) with some types of descriptive information (what things are like, how many are there, etc.). This provides a foundation for analysis and helps users understand patterns, relationships, and geographic context.

Although Intelion is no GIS in the conventional sense, it has a number of GIS functions, as the platform is able to display different types of data (identifications made by the AI analyzers) on a map, to make better sense of the location of the events, their frequency and the relationship between them in time and location. It is an important tool in the decision making process, because the map view shows, at a single glance, how the information is distributed. It can help showing relationships between locations if a time dimension is added. In our example image some of the events (crimes, in this particular case) have happened in Spain, and some have happened in India. This suggests an international connection and maybe even the involvement of some type of cartel.

Intelion can show the identifications that have been made on an interactive map.

Dynamic Maps

With the timeline and map the action can be pinpointed in time and position.

The combination of the timeline and the mapping function provide an invaluable tool to locate the identifications made by the AI analyzers both in time and in geographical position. This results in a clear understanding of the movements of suspect vehicles or persons, as well as the area they actually are in. The map reflects not only the detections made, but also the source (i.e. traffic camera) that has made them, and is completely interactive, allowing to zoom in on details, see a general view and even zoom out at world level for cases that span multiple countries.

More information about investigations in Intelion with the help of advanced maps, at our other use case: “Geo-location, vehicle routes and convoy detection”

Heatmapping

Another interesting map function is the heatmap view. From a GIS perspective, is a method of showing the geographic clustering of data. Sometimes also referred as hot spot mapping, heat maps show locations of higher densities of geographic entities or events by means of different colors, depending on the density or frequency of the event. Heat mapping is a way of geographically visualizing concentrations of events, so that patterns of higher than average occurrence of things likes crime activity, traffic accidents, or other can emerge.

The term “heat” term refers to the concentration of events within any given spot, not the actual temperatures at that spot. Heatmapping not only shows where the particular identifications were made, but also their frequency or accumulation in the same region. This provides valuable insight on people and vehicle movements, and show possible meeting points or areas where suspect operations take place with more frequency.

This tool is frequently used to discriminate or prioritize points of actuation, with those geographical locations with more activity being higher on the list when it comes to dispatching personnel or assigning resources to investigate.

The Intelion heatmap function shows the amount of identifications made at a certain point.

Watch Intelion in action

See how Intelion’s map functions help to find targets or suspects.

In this short video Intelion shows how to review a series of security or traffic cameras by geolocation on a map, to survey the activity or events in a certain area quickly or to find suspects previously identified either by face or by clothing.

Conclusion

The identification mapping functions are extremely useful in Intelion, as they provide a local, regional or even global overview of where the different events that have been recorded have taken place. This helps the decision making process when dispatching units or officers or when transferring jurisdiction to another state, region or country if the main activities take place outside of the current jurisdiction. It is a powerful feature to gain an understanding of the scope, location or distribution of certain events, be they criminal and law enforcement related, or not.