CAM-177
A crowd out to watch the flood
The river is running high and brown, almost level with the top of the wall. Along the riverside walk a long line of people is leaning on the railing to watch it, and on the bridge the parapet is taken from one end to the other. More keep arriving along the walk. IRIS counts how many people there are against the railing and how much freeboard is left between the water and the top of the wall; it does not know who any of them are.
Turn on IRIS Vision
AI-generated image
What IRIS understands
What it recognises in this scene
- people against the railing
- bridge parapet taken up
- more people arriving
- group on the far bank
- water level with the wall
What this camera measures
An alert says something is happening. The reading says how much.
- 24+9At the walkway railing
- 27On the bridge parapet
- 6Coming along the walkway
- 14 minGathered for
- 35 cmFreeboard to the top of the wall
- 18:10Time of the alert
The figures on this screen are an example from the illustration, not any client's measurement.
The rule
You decide once. IRIS applies it always.
If
there are more people in the strip of walkway next to the railing than the council has set, with the river above the warning level
Then
- alert the civil protection officer with the camera, the stretch and how many people there are
- say how much freeboard is left between the water and the top of the wall
- alert again if the group keeps growing
The instruction that set it up«Tell me when too many people gather against the walkway railing with the river up, and tell me while they are still gathering.»
What changes
What changes for whoever answers for the site
A river in flood is a spectacle, and that is nobody's fault: people go out to look at it the way they go out to look at anything that never happens. The problem is where they stand. A walkway railing is not designed for thirty people to lean on it at once, and neither is a bridge parapet. Today the duty officer finds out the walk is packed when he goes down to look or when somebody phones. With IRIS the alert reaches him while the group is still forming, with the camera, the stretch and the head count, and he can still send a patrol, use the tannoy or close the walk. Which of the three is his call. IRIS only makes sure he knows sooner.
What people usually ask
Isn't this just counting capacity?
Not quite. Capacity is how many people fit in a place; this is how many people are in the particular strip that gives onto the water, which is the one that matters. A walkway can be well under its capacity and still have thirty people leaning on the same length of railing. That second figure is the one that decides whether somebody has to go, and it is the one nobody has today.
Does IRIS know who the people watching are?
No. IRIS does not identify anyone: it does not recognise faces, it does not read number plates and it does not store who anybody is. It counts bodies and sees where they are standing. To know that a length of railing is loaded you only need to count, and that is all it does.
What if people have every right to be there?
They do, and that is exactly why the rule is written by the council and not by us. IRIS does not decide that a walkway gets closed. It supplies a fact — how many people are in that stretch and how much freeboard is left between the water and the wall — so that the decision to close, or not to close, is taken by whoever has the authority and answers for it. Without that fact the decision still gets taken; it just gets taken worse.
Demo · IRIS at work
We won't just tell you. We'll show you.
It is a summary of the real screen: it plays by itself, step by step, and shows only the path of one case. The actual tool has far more than fits in here.
- The rule gets built
- It goes to every camera
- Published, it watches alone
- And then it fires
Next step
How many bays are free right now?
15 cases: 9 raise an alert when something happens and 6 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
What does a venue with twenty thousand people inside see?
15 cases: 11 raise an alert when something happens and 4 only measure. You see each image as it is, and then with what IRIS understands on top.
And the best part
You already record.The hard part was always watching it.
Years of video that only get opened once something has gone wrong. IRIS understands those same images as they arrive, so the answer no longer lives only in the archive.
Tell us your problem and we will say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
We reply the same working day.