Seoul will convert more than half of the city’s more than 120,000 closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, operated by its district offices, into AI-based intelligent CCTV systems this year. The city also plans to integrate generative AI to improve situational assessments.
On March 10, Seoul City said it set this year’s target for intelligent CCTV conversion at 51.8%, aiming to increase the number of intelligent cameras from about 57,000 to roughly 64,000.
As of December, Seoul operated a CCTV monitoring network of about 120,000 cameras in cooperation with its 25 district offices. To address the limits of human monitoring—operators currently monitor an average of 1,200 cameras each—the city launched an AI-based intelligent CCTV upgrade project in 2023.
To reduce false positives and over-detection by AI, the city will launch a pilot program this year called “generative AI monitoring,” which applies generative AI built on small language models (sLLMs).
“We will evolve monitoring into a hybrid model that uses intelligent CCTV to detect incidents and generative AI to analyze context accurately,” said Oh Jung-seok, head of Seoul’s Smart CCTV team. “This approach will reduce staff burden and improve monitoring efficiency.”
By Jeong Hyun-jeong (iam@etnews.com)
