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 WSJ.com:
American Family Mutual Insurance will offer some of its customers a camera system known as DriveCam as a way of improving teenagers’ driving behavior. The DriveCam captures sights and sounds inside and outside the vehicle.
DriveCam’s palm-sized, exception based video event recorder is mounted on the windshield behind the rearview mirror and captures sights and sounds inside and outside the vehicle. Forces (e.g. hard braking, swerving, collision, etc.) cause the recorder to save 20 seconds of audio and video footage – the 10 seconds immediately before and after the triggered event.
When the video event recorder is triggered a light blinks to alert the driver. This is intentional so the driver knows what he/she did to activate the video event recorder and can aim to avoid repeating that behavior.
DriveCam’s Certified Driving Behavior Analysts take a cursory look at downloaded events to identify anything that would be critical for a customer to know immediately (e.g. a collision). Next, the experts closely review and assign a risk score to each event.
The story provides some anecdotes of teenagers who claim that the blinking light has led them to drive in a safer fashion. I think the feedback loop here is an important component for not only tracking behavior, but also trying to improve it. Read the article to get the full details on privacy, the role of parents, and how this will affect our insurance rates. Here is the WSJ video (the article is much better):
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From CNET News.com
A Dutch company, Sound Intelligence, has an audio sensor system that can detect people speaking in aggressive tones. The system can then alert officials that violence may be imminent. According to the technology overview, there are certain sounds that are “indicative of aggression and fear have specific characteristics to which any person can not help but respond.” The company claims several installations with happy clients. This is a good example of how sensors can be a useful addition to smart camera systems.
Slashdot’s YRO also linked to this story, but there I didn’t see anything insightful in the posted comments.
Update: The Times has a better article on the technology. Some highlights:
The sensors are used at 300 sites in Holland.
The equipment can pick up aggressive tones on the basis of 12 factors, including decibel level, pitch and the speed at which words are spoken. Background noise is filtered out, enabling the camera to focus on specific conversations in public places. . . . “The cameras work on the principle that in an aggressive situation the pitch goes up and the words are spoken faster,” said van der Vorst. “The voice is not the normal flat tone, but vibrates. It is these subtle changes that our audio cameras can pick up on.”
Police and local council officials are still assessing their impact on crime, although in an initial six-week trial in Groningen last year the cameras raised 70 genuine alarms, resulting in four arrests.
“In the UK this is a new step. Clearly there is somebody or something monitoring people speaking in the street, and before we were to engage in that technology there would be a number of legal obstacles.
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From Daily Southtown:
Eyenet is an Illinois company that sells ALPR (automatic license plate recognition) technology. It can work with the existing camera and laptop in the squad car. This means its a lot easier and cheaper to deploy their technology. I don’t know the cost, but we are likely to see its widespread use. ALPR (also known as ANPR) works well and is a very useful tool for the police. Its a great example of smart camera technology.
Check out their web site, it appears to have some nice demos.
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From SecurityInfoWatch.com:
IBM is now officially entering the smart camera market. They call their system the S3 for Smart Surveillance System. I have been waiting for this announcement. IBM has been doing a significant amount of research on smart surveillance or what they use to call their PeopleVision project. You can get a lot more information on the S3 system including technical publications over at IBM Research. Its fairly impressive and you wonder how this will transfer over to their products. Its nice from my position to see a vendor flex their technical acumen.
Also, this is another sign of the importance of this industry. The big players are moving in and swallowing startups. Last week Siemens Building Technologies acquired Vistascape.
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From Red Herring:
Boeing has won a contract estimated to be worth $2.5 billion on securing America’s borders. Boeing is planning to install a network of cameras and sensors for the Secure Border Initiative. For background, see 1, 2, and 3.
This is going to support and create a whole range of advance surveillance technologies, including smart cameras. The Red Herring article points out that there are lots of companies moving into the video analytics market.
It also mentions several companies developing smart camera technology that venture capitalists have been supporting:
Agentvi (formerly Aspectus), IntelliVid, Covi, VideoNext, Vigilos, Aspectus, 3VR Security, and EnVysion
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From SecurityInfoWatch.com:
The title says it all:
Video analytics company VistaScape will be joining the folds of building systems integrator Siemens Building Technologies, the companies announced today.
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From Capital New 9:
A story on research at GE on smart camera technology. Nothing new, but another company focused on this market.
The article quotes Peter Tu:
“We’ve got thousand and thousands of cameras already up, you’ve got million and millions of pixels collected every second, if you really want to be proactive about stopping events that you might not even anticipate, video is essentially on of the key elements.”
And so in a world that’s battling terrorism, GE’s video surveillance projects are crucial. Research Scientist Peter Tu and his team have been working on software that allows them to see several camera angles as one bird’s eye view, programs that enhance face recognition. They can even track people in crowds.
Tu said, “If one is acting erratic or suspiciously then we can track this person, figure out who he is with, who he or she has been meeting with, what objects they’re working with, which kinds of threatening behaviors, and possibly look them up against a database against know perps and terrorists.” . . Tu said, “We can understand the motion of people, hopefully we can get to the point where we can get an articulated model of individuals and based on those motions and where people are looking, all of these things together we can combine that with the knowledge of what constitutes a dangerous act versus a safe one.”
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From The Detroit News Online:
An article about the smart cameras at San Francisco International Airport. It points out the basic uses for cameras such as “two airport workers scooting through a security door at the same time, when they should enter one at a time, or a vehicle parked too long at a place where it shouldn’t be.”
But for much more detail on the smart cameras at the airport, see the webinar by Vidient. It has lots of great information. The airport evaluated 18 cameras for 7 different behaviors. The final results were a > 91% accuracy rate with over 700 staged events and a 1% false detection rate.
The tested behaviors included:
Exit Lane Detection
Baggage Jam Detection
Baggage Inspection Table
Access Controlled doors
Vehicle Access Control
Large Stationary Vehicle
Stationary Vehicle
This was sponsored by Homeland Security and a sanitized version of the report will be available at some point.
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Poseidon Systems offers smart camera technology for drowning detection. It relies on underwater cameras and a processor that analyzes/tracks swimmers in real-time. They have press releases stating that their system helped detect near drownings. Here is a screen shot from their web site:
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