From CNN.com:
A nice interview with Sergio Velastin of Ipsotek out of the UK. Velastin is a leading scholar on developing smart camera systems. Some quotes from the article:
Industry experts suggest that after 12 minutes of continuous video monitoring an operator will miss up to 45 percent of screen activity. That rises to up to 95 percent after 22 minutes.
“Humans will always be better than machines at spotting real behavior, but most security guards have an almost impossible task to watch so many screens all the time that they can’t be used practically,” Velastin told CNN.
“Most people do things in a fairly straight forward way and we’re able to gain statistical knowledge of what they do. From that it follows that you can raise an alarm if something is deemed ‘infrequent’, which usually means abnormal or suspicious,” he said. It sounds simple enough, but the task of creating a computer program that can filter out all the normal background goings on of a situation, be it on a train station platform or high street, has proved to be extremely complex.
In three to five years we hope to have a program that would identify from your walk whether or not you are carrying a gun,” he told CNN.
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From Sun-Times:
280 Chicago Police squad cars will be getting video cameras (there are currently 30 cars with cameras). The project will cost $2.2 million. They eventually hope to put cameras in all the cars, but that will take a while since the department has 1,773 marked cars and 1,354 unmarked vehicles.
Each squad car is equipped with two cameras that can either be activated manually or automatically when emergency lights are turned on. One camera records those in the backseat. The other is mounted on the windshield and faces forward. The officer carries a microphone the size of a beeper that records sounds within 1,000 feet of the vehicle. Real-time audio and video can be transmitted back to the district station.
Already, the cameras have provided evidence in 10 court cases, including video of a Christmas Day hit-and-run that was shown to reporters today and prompted a guilty plea. Squad car cameras are widely viewed as a deterrent against police misconduct, but it’s a two-way street. They also shield honest, professional officers from unwarranted citizen complaints, Daley said.
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From Business 2.0 via CNN Money.com:
Another approach that computer processing (the smarts) can exploit is analyzing sound. It is an interesting idea and so far the most notable is the gunshot detection systems.
Sound has a number of advantages including its cheaper (a high quality camera is $500, a high quality microphone is $50) and audio takes less bandwidth. Here are a couple of potential uses:
Sure, intelligent software can examine hours of security video footage and, say, try to recognize intruders, but it’s far easier to train a computer to listen for the sound of breaking glass.
A guard at a bank of screens can’t always monitor the right one. Listening algorithms can filter out the air-conditioning and hear a door opening in an abandoned corridor. By triangulating the sounds of footsteps, the software can then tell security cameras where to point.
Listening devices can monitor how efficiently office space is put to use. If a spare conference room is filled with hubbub less than once a week, it might be time to turn it into a cube farm.
I think its a great idea and I wonder if more vendors will consider implementing smart microphones. While there are legal issues with government use of microphones in surveillance, there is no reason it can’t be used by private parties for lots of different applications.
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