Vision AI company Oosto has partnered with Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises, one of the largest tribal casino owners and operators in the U.S., to protect its flagship River Spirit Casino and Resort’s gaming floors in Oklahoma, with face-based security software incorporated throughout its facility’s cameras.

At 200,000 square feet, River Spirit Casino receives approximately 10,000 guests per day. The environment for security teams is a complex, cross-site operational challenge in managing the identification of bad actors in real time and under various levels of lighting, occlusions and face coverings. River Spirit Casino’s security team realized that in order to maintain the property’s reputation, combat thefts and fraud, maintain compliance with regulatory requirements, and be able to research video footage retrospectively for investigative purposes, facial recognition technology offered numerous benefits.

Upon implementing Oosto OnWatch real-time watchlist alerting to recognize potential security threats, the solution delivered operational efficiencies by ensuring that evicted and banned patrons were immediately identified and apprehended, while security teams were able to better track persons of interest throughout the venue without disruption to guests.

“With Oosto, we have eliminated most of the manual processes associated with identifying bad actors as they enter the casino. When a patron does something inside the property that is considered a crime or unwanted, that person is barred from entering the property again,” said Travis Thompson, director of compliance, Muscogee Gaming Nation. “Their profile is entered into Oosto, and the system looks for that face every time they enter the property. Since implementing Oosto, we see anywhere from three to five positive detections per day. We know that we’re keeping the right people out and I think that makes our players more comfortable.”

Security integration and consulting firm partner Orion Security Solutions had conducted proof-of-concept projects with Oosto’s software and knew that not only did OnWatch deliver as promised, it worked really well in the casino space. “Casinos are pretty challenging environments, to be honest,” said Sean Crain, president and CEO, Orion Security Solutions. “We need a facial recognition system to spot banned patrons in spite of large groups of people entering all at once, cameras being positioned quite high, visitors not looking directly into cameras, and even if people are wearing face coverings like masks, hats or glasses. Oosto’s facial recognition system is able to identify potential problem people accurately and in real-time under these tough conditions. And that allows the security and the surveillance team to anticipate, prevent and deter crime and bad behavior before it happens. The Muscogee Nation saw the value in that.”

Oosto has been helping to proactively safeguard casino and gaming spaces worldwide for several years. “We were really excited to demonstrate how much value Oosto’s vision AI could provide to Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises in support of their very busy security team,” said Adi Nativ, chief revenue officer, Oosto. “When battle-tested against other facial recognition technology providers in complex environments, Oosto always proves to be the superior solution ‘in the wild’ - our accuracy and speed of detection are unmatched. So we couldn’t wait to help elevate River Spirit Casino’s operations to a new level. We truly value their trust in us.”

Additional advantages to using Oosto’s system include the company’s Centralized Intelligence Database module, which offers River Spirit Casino a one-source destination that houses information on all bad actors from Muscogee Nation’s multiple properties. Moreover, if a crime happens on the property and River Spirit Casino’s team needs to look retrospectively at historical video footage for information on activity leading up to, during and after the crime, Oosto’s Inquiry/OnSearch Forensics Analytics tool can ingest video from multiple sources and quickly analyze the footage to inform teams about the full context of a perpetrator’s actions. 

According to Thompson, “The investigations is a critical piece to how we use Oosto — it’s one of the areas that I really enjoy the most about it. We can backward search or we can forward search from the point we put in and so we know when people have been on our property and I think that’s extremely helpful to us.”

Today, there are 524 American Indian gaming operations in the U.S., and Indian reservation casinos represent 43 percent of all casino gaming revenue in the U.S., according to the National Indian Gaming Commission. According to the American Gaming Association (AGA), 2021 was a record year for casino and gaming industry revenues, and while a boom in mobile sports betting is partially responsible for this surge, in-person gambling continues to dominate, as revenue growth was driven by in-person casinos, rather than mobile sports betting and iGaming.