Sentinel

Inspiration

We were inspired to create this project by the recent Fairfax County security measures. These measures revolved around metal detectors to detect weapons and prevent harmful situations. However, this solution is easily bypassed with numerous methods. Furthermore, the security panels for monitoring cameras are outdated and manual, leading to a gap of up to 5 minutes between the fight and actual intervention. With Sentinel, we can truly protect students or any other building with cameras.

What it does

Sentinel looks at all the different feeds to examine the safety of students. Using Gemini to examine the feeds, Sentinel returns the risk chance of the fight occurring based on body movements and language. It can also differentiate between fake fights for fun and true fights that could escalate to dangerous situations.

How we built it

We built our website using Tailwind, React with TypeScript, and Leaflet for the frontend. At the backend, we used FastAPI for connection between the site and our models, as well as Node and Uvicorn. Our database was Supabase.

Challenges we ran into

The interactive map would show different cameras than what we wanted, and we had to fine-tune our prompt to Gemini multiple times to properly detect fights.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our Fight Detection program and UI.

What we learned

We learned how to use Gemini for video analysis and return exact risk percentages.

What's next for Sentinel

Well, currently, Sentinel can only detect fights. This can be extremely important in areas like prisons and crime-heavy areas of cities, but other locations and buildings with security cameras might not have fighting as a big issue. This leads to the biggest thing we want to do next with Sentinel. We want to expand the types of activity our system can detect. For example, pickpocketing. Pickpocketing is a big issue in major cities, especially in areas like the subway in New York. By expanding our system to be able to detect pickpocketing, we can help save millions of dollars' worth of phones, cash, credit cards, and other items that are pickpocketed every year, and this is only one example.