DARLENE – Improving situational awareness of European law enforcement agents through a combination of augmented reality and artificial intelligence solutions

Background: Augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are highly disruptive technologies that have revolutionised practices in a wide range of domains. Their potential has not gone unnoticed in the security sector with several law enforcement agencies (LEAs) employing AI applications in their daily operations for forensics and surveillance. In this paper, we present the DARLENE ecosystem, which aims to bridge existing gaps in applying AR and AI technologies for rapid tactical decision-making in situ with minimal error margin, thus enhancing LEAs’ efficiency and Situational Awareness (SA). Methods: DARLENE incorporates novel AI techniques for computer vision tasks such as activity recognition and pose estimation, while also building an AR framework for visualization of the inferenced results via dynamic content adaptation according to each individual officer’s stress level and current context. The concept has been validated with end-users through co-creation workshops, while the decision-making mechanism for enhancing LEAs’ SA has been assessed with experts. Regarding computer vision components, preliminary tests of the instance segmentation method for humans’ and objects’ detection have been conducted on a subset of videos from the RWF-2000 dataset for violence detection, which have also been used to test a human pose estimation method that has so far exhibited impressive results and will constitute the basis of further developments in DARLENE. Results: Evaluation results highlight that target users are positive towards the adoption of the proposed solution in field operations, and that the SA decision-making mechanism produces highly acceptable outcomes. Evaluation of the computer vision components yielded promising results and identified opportunities for improvement. Conclusions: This work provides the context of the DARLENE ecosystem and presents the DARLENE architecture, analyses its individual technologies, and demonstrates preliminary results, which are positive both in terms of technological achievements and user acceptance of the proposed solution.