The growing use of facial recognition and electronic surveillance in Australia’s gaming sector is highlighting a much broader question for venue operators: how much more can they do with the video infrastructure already deployed across their properties?
A deployment at Resorts World Las Vegas provides one example of where the technology is heading.
The 88-acre Las Vegas resort has connected approximately 5,800 cameras to Milestone Systems’ XProtect video management software, creating an integrated video ecosystem supporting security, gaming compliance, investigations and operational analytics.
Opened in 2021, the US$4.3 billion Resorts World complex includes more than 3,500 hotel rooms, a casino, entertainment venues, retail outlets and more than 50 food and beverage offerings.
At that scale, video surveillance generates an enormous amount of data. The challenge is increasingly not simply capturing footage, but making it possible for operators to rapidly find, analyse and act on relevant information.
Resorts World has integrated cameras from multiple manufacturers with specialist technologies including BriefCam video analytics, facial recognition, fraud and cheating detection, people counting and heat mapping.
The open-platform model means those systems can operate through a broader video ecosystem rather than requiring the resort to depend upon a single camera or analytics provider.
It is an approach with increasing relevance in Australia as regulators and gaming operators examine how technology can strengthen compliance and harm-minimisation programs.
NSW is currently moving towards a statewide exclusion register for hotels and clubs with gaming machines, backed by mandatory facial recognition technology from 2028. The technology is intended to help venues automatically identify people who have excluded themselves rather than relying entirely on staff to recognise them.
The NSW Independent Casino Commission already requires casinos to maintain processes for preventing excluded patrons from entering and says it is working with the industry to improve electronic surveillance methods.
The issue has practical consequences. The Star Sydney was fined $500,000 by the regulator in June after an excluded patron was able to enter the casino nine times during a three-month period in 2024.
Other states also place considerable emphasis on casino surveillance. Queensland legislation, for example, requires gaming areas to be clearly observable and requires casino operators to provide regulators with details of CCTV camera positions, heights and coverage. Inspectors are also empowered to view video recordings of casino operations.
The Resorts World deployment demonstrates how the same video environment required for security and compliance can potentially provide additional operational value.
BriefCam analytics are being used for forensic video review, people counting and heat mapping, while other applications help analyse foot traffic and customer behaviour. This potentially allows a venue to understand how people move through a large property as well as investigate individual security incidents.
Milestone argues that the advantage of an open platform is the ability to introduce specialised technologies as requirements change.
“An open platform approach allows this Las Vegas casino resort to bring together best-of-breed technologies into a single ecosystem, enabling teams to improve investigations, support regulatory requirements, and generate operational insights that extend well beyond traditional security,” said Tim Palmquist, VP Americas at Milestone Systems.
The Australian adoption of more sophisticated video analytics will nevertheless have to develop alongside privacy safeguards.
NSW guidance for hotels and clubs using facial recognition includes requirements covering privacy, data handling and security. Liquor & Gaming NSW has also warned that simply displaying signs notifying customers that facial recognition is operating may not, on its own, satisfy obligations under the Australian Privacy Principles.
That makes governance an increasingly important part of the intelligent-video equation.
For casinos and other large Australian hospitality and entertainment venues, the opportunity is therefore not simply to install more cameras. It is to make better use of the video data they already collect – while ensuring the analytics applied to that information remain appropriate to the regulatory and privacy environment in which they operate.
