Australian Turf Club racing track implements Oosto facial recognition tech to detect watchlist security threats

The largest racetrack in Sydney, Australia, has partnered with Oosto for face-based protection throughout its facility to improve its security credentials. 

Image credit: Oosto

The Australian Turf Club’s (ATC) Royal Randwick Racecourse is visited by more than one million patrons each year, creating a complex set of security requirements for guests and employees alike.

Challenges for security teams included managing evictions of known offenders and self-excluded gaming patrons across multiple entries and exits. Relying on the human eye or memory alone proved to be challenging in recognising repeat offenders at ATC’s other racecourse locations. Coupled with protecting more than 500 staff on major race days (300 of which are security personnel), the Australian Turf Club was tasked with consistently maintaining a world-class entertainment experience without compromising on safety and security.

The Club has implemented Oosto’s OnWatch watchlist alerting to recognise potential security threats, which is said to be delivering improvements in operations by ensuring that evicted and banned patrons are immediately refused entry, while security teams are able to better track persons of interest throughout the venue without disruption.

“Positioned at key entry points, our passive cameras were turned into smart cameras with Oosto’s video analytics software nearly instantly,” said Gary Colston, Head of Security and Access at Australian Turf Club. “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.” Moreover, said Colston, “We needed something that was user-friendly. If it’s too complicated, [security teams] won’t use it and it becomes a waste of money.”

Working together with security consulting firm partner, Quorum Security, Oosto was able to help ATC significantly improve the rate of detection of persons of interest onsite, explains the company. Eric Yang, Regional Head of Sales, Oosto added: “A key differentiation Oosto’s solution offers is the ability for users to search backward in time, by having a photo loaded in the system and locate offenders’ whereabouts historically and quickly, as opposed to tracking their steps only from a specific point in time onwards. We’re very happy to see our product being rolled out here to its best use.”

Oosto’s technology is also in use at the Club to help protect guarded points of entry for authorised employees. According to Colston, this proved especially beneficial recently: “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.”

The rate of facial recognition technology adoption among sports venues, casinos, and corporate buildings is increasing as a watchlist alerting, access control, and forensic investigation tool. The market is facing explosive growth and is expected to quadruple by 2026, according to analysis from Mordor Intelligence.

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