ilani moves surveillance from review to prevention.
The surveillance team at ilani Casino Resort uses eConnect facial recognition to find barred guests, help police find people at risk, and stop problems before they start. They do not need a name. They only need a face.
Alerts over a Friday and Saturday on people the team wants to know about
20 seconds
To check a tribal police photo against face records
2 seconds
To put a name to a photo shared by other properties
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So with facial recognition, I don’t need to know your name. I just need to know your face. The technology does that for me. It recognizes you and it tracks you for me.
ilani is a large property. It has over 2,500 slot machines, 75 to 80 table games, a parking garage and an entertainment center. Thousands of people come through every weekend.
Most surveillance work starts after an incident. The team reviews video of things that already happened. People who want to cause trouble often do not use a real identity, so a name alone does not help.
Staff also cannot remember every face. Other properties send photos of card counters and ask for a name. Before facial recognition, the team relied on POS reports and camera coverage.
02
The solution
A face becomes the starting point.
ilani uses eConnect facial recognition to recognize and track people across the property. The team data analyst loaded barred guests and other profiles at the start. That work took time, but the team knew it would pay back.
The team also uses an early version of the eConnect associations feature and POS Connect. POS Connect ties point of sale data to camera coverage, so investigators can research a transaction fast.
✓Automated alerts go to the whole team when a barred or self barred guest arrives.
✓ID checks at the door tie a face to a record.
✓Photos from tribal police and other properties go straight into face search.
✓Training resources give staff a library of courses.
“The beautiful part about facial recognition is if I can get a decent picture of their face, I can immediately get to a door.”
Facial recognition lets the team act in the moment. Over a busy Friday and Saturday, it gets 15 to 20 alerts on people it does not want in the building or wants to know about.
The team works closely with tribal police. When a person may be in danger, a photo goes from an email into face search in about 20 seconds. The system also flags people who try to come back before they make things right. That has helped the property recover money.
Buy in grew across the property. When every department saw how it could use facial recognition, approvals came faster.
“This tool has helped us really be proactive in preventing some things that haven’t happened yet.”
“There’s excellent training resources… It’s just been upgrade after upgrade and improvement after improvement.”
Surveillance supervisor, ilani Casino Resort
“…when you encompass everybody and you bring in all the different departments and show the value of how each department can use facial recognition, we get a lot more buy in and we see approvals much faster.”
