Chicago Looks for a Shovel
The March 2009 issue of Chicago has an article titled, “Can Cameras Replace Cops?”. It focuses the policing strategies of the CPD and the move away from community partnerships to a reliance on technology. They use a marvelous phrase – “geeks with guns”, to describe the new approach. One interesting nugget in the article is the recent use of video analytics or smart camera technology. Here is the example provided by Orozco, the commissioner of the OEMC:
authorities were trying to determine whether someone had buried something in a park. Using video analytics, they gave the camera system an “inject,” the image of a shovel, and had the system troll through months of prerecorded footage. (Nothing was found).
I was very deflated after reading this. This was the best example they could find! It seems hard to justify the expense of a technology for this example. Especially, when there are many ways/tools to bury something. It seems a hard problem to solve with video analytics. (Maybe the experts will tell me I am wrong.) Lets hope the city can find some better uses for the half million dollars spent on video analytics.
It’s a fairly straightforward problem to solve in a controlled environment but an incredibly difficult one in operational deployments using hundreds of cameras installed over many years.
Almost certainly most of the park is not covered with cameras – so the odds are against you to start. Worse, that image of a shovel will be hard to recognize in bright sun or in low light, because of how lighting impacts images. Then, of course, you have issues will different angles of the shovel from various camera’s positioning.