Forecourts Security

Mitigating crime such as drive off, shoplifting and violence towards staff continue to present a security challenge on forecourts. The British Oil Security Syndicate, BOSS, has estimated that total losses incurred by the forecourt industry in Britain during 2006 amounted to £28.9 million where 82% of these losses were due to driving off without payment and motorists who claimed had no means of pay. Kevin Eastwood, executive director of BOSS, said: "Crime on forecourts remains at unacceptable levels.”

Autonomy Virage supports every stage of security and surveillance operations, providing an extensive range of advanced recognition and recording systems as well as capabilities for instant and post event retrieval and analytics. A flexible and entirely modular architecture allows customers to select products according to their specific requirements to create tailor-made, highly sophisticated security systems.

A system can not predict if a person is not intending to pay, but it could contain records relating to a person or vehicle’s history. The intention is therefore, to implement a two stage process. Once it has been realised that a “Drive off” has occurred the system should be used to automatically identify the vehicle and license, or number, plate that has committed the offence, and log the incident. Background video recording from across the site can be used to confirm the vehicles’ occupant did not attempt to pay. The relevant information can then be disseminated to other networked forecourts. In future, when the same vehicle enters a forecourt in the future, an alert can be raised prior to fuel dispensation being allowed, based on the distributed intelligence. Upon this alert the operator has a choice of action; they may request payment in advance for any fuel, raise the issue of the previous event and request payment or in extreme cases refuse service.

Autonomy Virage’s suite of products can vastly improve surveillance systems and reduce losses. By automatically tagging and associating data from EPOS terminals with video footage, fraudulent activity at the point of sale can be targeted and eliminated based on concrete evidence. Autonomy Virage’s video analytics can be used in vast range of locations to improve surveillance operations, issuing alerts when needed.