WatchGuard Video, which focuses solely on the law enforcement sector, recently released REDACTIVE, video and audio redaction software that expedites the redaction process and makes the job easier for evidence technicians and law enforcement officers.
Video redaction, or the alteration of certain parts of video – mostly in the form of blurring – is seeing more demand in the law enforcement community. With the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), redaction requests have become more frequent than ever.
“Law enforcement agencies are subject to Freedom of Information Act requests which in most states redaction is mandated,” said Steve Coffman, President of WatchGuard Video, a developer of law enforcement video evidence solutions. “In the wake of the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 and ever-changing state legislation regarding treatment of video evidence, agencies are shouldering the burden of a significant increase in the quantity and complexity of redaction requests. Redaction requirements can vary from the very specific (i.e. redaction of minors) to the very broad (i.e. redaction of uninvolved bystanders).”
Without advanced redaction tools, doing the blurring and alterations on video is a complicated process. “Prior to redaction, this process was time-consuming and quite arduous to effectively redact the information required under law. In many instances, because of the inefficiency of other redaction tools, the departments would resort to blurring the entire frame,” Coffman said. “Today’s redaction tools simply aren’t keeping up, forcing agencies to either miss submission deadlines or compromise their output by delivering video that blurs out everything useful.”
Against this backdrop, WatchGuard, which focuses solely on the law enforcement sector, recently released REDACTIVE, video and audio redaction software that expedites the redaction process and makes the job easier for evidence technicians and law enforcement officers.
What makes the software unique compared to others in the market is its usage of facial recognition, which automatically detects and identifies human faces, thus reducing the overall time spent manually searching and marking the video for redaction. “REDACTIVE is the only software in the law enforcement market that utilizes facial recognition technology to identify potential faces for redaction,” Coffman said. “Users begin the redaction process by instructing the software to auto-detect any face in the video. Once identified, the user simply clicks on the box over the face of the person to be redacted and the software tracks and blurs the face of that person through the entire video- checking backward and forward.”
Another difficulty associated with redaction is the muting or alteration of audio, and this has been addressed by REDACTIVE, too. “Audio redaction was even more complex and required specialized training,” Coffman said, adding using WatchGuard’s product, “redaction of the audio portion is simple as well. The audio track displays below the video, the user highlights the area to be muted.”
According to Coffman, WatchGuard has begun taking orders for REDACTIVE and will begin shipping December 1, 2016.
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