Prestigious Aussie Racetrack Bets On Oosto for Biometric Security

Oosto has won a high-profile deployment in Australia: the prestigious Australian Turf Club is using Oosto’s facial recognition technology for both security and VIP identification.

The venue is Sydney’s largest racetrack, featuring the Royal Randwick Racecourse, and it attracts over a million patrons per year. That all amounts to a complex security environment, demanding a security staff of 300 individuals alongside an additional 200-person workforce administrating the venue. Not only do venue operators need to watch for known security threats, but they must also keep out self-excluded gaming patrons while watching for VIPs who require an exceptionally high level of service.

The Australian Turf Club is now automating all of those activities thanks to Oosto’s OnWatch solution, which applies facial recognition through existing security camera feeds to immediately identify known individuals.

“Positioned at key entry points, our passive cameras were turned into smart cameras with Oosto’s video analytics software nearly instantly,” explained Australian Turf Club Head of Security and Access Gary Colston. “We didn’t have to invest in a bunch of brand new cameras or a massive amount of servers and things like that. It was easy for us to implement it on our system.”

In addition to providing real-time alerts, Oosto’s OnWatch allows administrators to scan security feeds for the activities of certain individuals during a given period – a feature that is already paying off, as Colston explains.

“One of our staff members was assaulted and we were able to obtain a photo of the person we thought had done it and run them through the facial rec system here and we were able to locate him at the event at the time and have that person banned,” he said.

In a statement announcing the deployment, Oosto emphasized the importance of using facial recognition effectively while ensuring that individuals’ privacy is protected. Late last year, the Australian Information Commissioner determined that the notorious American startup Clearview AI had violated the country’s Privacy Act by collecting Australians’ biometric data without their consent and failing to inform them about its activities – a ruling that Oosto celebrated.

Oosto’s Australian Turf Club deployment was conducted in partnership with the consulting firm Quorum Security. Its announcement comes soon after Oosto’s Chief AI Scientist, Professor Marios Savvides, was named Inventor of the Year by the Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association.

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Aug. 4, 2022 – by Alex Perala