Effective threat detection for surveillance

Surveillance video and protocols are only as effective as the people who are doing the monitoring. Threats might be overlooked because they are rare. Our experiment tested in the security domain what others have found in the medical domain: that repeating a rare event to make it less rare will make it more likely to be remembered, and hence, to be able to be reported. Results of our experiment supported the hypothesis that repeating rare events will make them more likely to be detected. We also looked at the relationship between threat detection performance and age, perceived level of attention, and recording procedure time devoted to each threat. Our specific findings concerning these factors led us to suggest actionable protocols to improve security officers´ threat detection performance in video and live surveillance. Airport, border, urban, and other types of security screeners might benefit from these recommendations.