To stop crime, Gujarat wants to integrate 80,000 CCTV cameras into a single system. Here’s the plan

The Gujarat government aims to integrate over 80,000 CCTV cameras from 26 departments into a single, unified system. This project aims to enhance the efficiency of police investigations, particularly in tracking vehicles and their movements across the state. Currently, the diverse cameras, built by various companies using different technologies, are installed in diverse locations and under various government schemes.

The police view an integrated system as a way to bypass the time-consuming manual identification of security cameras and enable automatic detection of vehicle and person movement within the field of vision of the cameras.

To address this issue, the Gujarat government has announced a hackathon to invite tech solutions from over 700 entities. Participants will have 12-hour feeds from CCTV cameras across five departments with various problems, including night and day footage, grainy footage, blurred footage, and footage in different environments and weather conditions.

The goal is to integrate these cameras into a single video management and analytics ecosystem, which will support viewing capabilities for public-facing CCTV cameras and enable automatic real-time alerts and proactive monitoring for law enforcement agencies.