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The article being in a UK publication, somebody decided to 'sex it up' and blathered on about the "AI" aspect instead of the real (but evolutionary) news.

Everything they talked about these new cameras doing is being done (with varying degrees of reliability) by camera systems today. One of the common terms for that stuff in industry is "intelligent analytics" and there are more than a couple of vendors of various kinds server-hosted software that can perform such analytical processing and send reactionary commands to the nearest camera.

The real (but evolutionary) news in this is that the processing performance available in small and very-low-power packages is believed to have grown enough to allow moving these intelligent analysis algorithms off of the servers and down in to the cameras themselves thereby allowing extremely rapid (article mentioned 300ms) reactions to the event that the analytics found interesting. http://www.objectvideo.com/products/onboard/ is an example of a company from whom you can buy similar implementations today but theirs is limited to only certain video-based analyses whereas the article talks about plans to support a richer spectrum of analytics in the CCTV's on-board processing.

As someone who works in this industry, this is nothing new. Others have done it for years now (notice that all the companies linked here are based in different countries), but gotta love IBM for taking credit for something which they neither invented nor perfected.

This technology has been around for some time now and has been tested successfully in many instances. Contrary to the impression this article gives, the technology came from US and Israel, where it was successfully used for border surveillance and also for protecting airports and railways, infrastructure crtical for teh working of a company. This is reflected in the companies working on this technology, namely Object Video, IoImage etc. But lately UK has become very active in this and like with most surveillance technologies, it has surpassed the rest of the world but the applications that UK is looking at are not all 1984ish. One of the biggest applications which is being looked in UK is to alart the CCTV operators when a car parks in the hard shoulder for more than say 5 minutes and automatically alert highway patrols. This is potentially very useful. I am not sure about the rest of the people here but I have spent hours on the roadside with a punctured tire in really cold weather on more than one occasion (on for those are wondering why I didn't use the spare, try changing a driver's side tyre with all the big trucks passing within a feet or so of you and you will know) and I think it would have been great if help had come sooner. So like all technology, the technology itself is not bad. But you can use in both constructive and destructive way.

I used to intern at ObjectVideo. They're a DARPA spin-off. I got to sit in the cubicle with all the PhDs and watch them as they used remote control cars to test their tracking cameras. Their products are really pretty stunning.

The basic idea is that if you have a complex with 100 security cameras, you're going to have half a dozen security guards sitting there looking at a huge bank of video feeds. Studies show that guards tend to just phase out after about twenty minutes anyway. So all those security cameras are really pretty worthless.

Instead, you run all the video feeds through a set of servers, the servers can detect moving objects and track them. It's more sophisticated than basic motion detection. They can differentiate between cars, dogs, trucks, boats, etc. They can even tell if you drop or pick up a bag, or throw something. Some applications of their technology can be used to monitor highways for instance: cars traveling north-to-south produce no alert, while cars traveling south-to-north set off the alarm.

This technology removes the human restriction on scale and overcomes the diminishing returns barrier to deploying huge huge banks of CCTVs all over a chemical plant, or military base, or corporate HQ, or national border.

(And as a side note, their IT guy was a real hard-ass about information security. He gave me a personal, one-on-one, 45 minute lecture about everything I wasn't allowed to do, or even think about doing, when I arrived. Guy had the place locked down tight, and easily out-nerded the dozen or so PhDs who were doing the actual coding and development. Just sat in the server room with the petabyte backup drives and listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. Hilarious.)

I have to post anonymously because I work in this field.

I believe there are many embeded DVR systems over there, based on DSPs and OSes like pSOS, VxWorks, Linux.

Try this one: http://www.objectvideo.com/ .

I used to intern for a DARPA spinoff, ObjectVideo. DARPA gives away the fruits of its labors all the time under a very liberal license, which basically allows a private corporation to continue for-profit public development of DARPA technology, while allowing for government walk-on rights on technology subsequently developed. In fact, most government research and development goes straight to the private sector where development is continued and sold to the general public.