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3-D Surveillance Technology
scubacuda writes "According to this Technology Review article, a new surveillance technology called Video Flashlight melds 3-D models from background scenes. This "tweening process" allows security persononnel to fly around a subject such as a pedestrian, getting a detailed look without jumping between widely separated views."
That's just flat out cool.
You "DO" see all of someone. As the article says, this technology just uses hundreds of cameras, and merges their information in realtime. Of course the criminal might notice the couple hundred cameras as he walks down the street .... but at least you'll have a 3D view of him as he steals one of them.
I can foresee a bright future for this technology in the pr0n industry... Combine it with a VR helmet, and you're on the way to re-enact some cool scenes from Strange Days!
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Yeah, I know they say that they are using multiple cameras and just using tweening to fill in gaps between frames, but when you start sticking little stuff in, how do you know what's real and what's not?
Made me think of the character in Stranger in a Strange Land, can't remember her name, but she was a trained witness of some sort and would not testify, for example that a house was white on all sides unless she had seen all sides of the house and then she wouldn't testify that the sides of the house she could no longer see had stayed white. Granted, that's a little extreme, but the average Joe is gonna believe what he sees is true, and this is mucking with that truth just a little bit. If this is used in court, is an expert going to be able to testify that only certain parts were added? Wouldn't that seem a little odd to a jury, "Hi, we're going to show you a videotape of something that happened and you're going to have to take it as gospel...AFTER we tell you that we added a few little bits to it."?
Course, I'm paranoid, if someone tells me they mucked with it a little bit, I'm gonna assume they added exactly what they wanted me to see...
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Hmmm...Probably not. This technique has been around for a while, but not really practical or smooth except with recent technologies. The Matrix trick was very unsophistocated in terms of electronics. Its just a few hundred cameras that are synched and can be switched from in a linear method giving the illusion of 1 single camera.
Several years ago, there was a product released on the Mac (and then simply disappearing) called Canomera. It took 2 camera positions and after you filled in a few details such as corners of buildings and all that stuff, it could interpolate between the 2 (or more) picts and allow this same sort of trick. If one had static cameras with these corner positions prelocated, it would be dead simple to create a realtime fly through with the same software base.
clif
First, a sensible editorial from the Vancouver Sun.
Second, some words from the Canadian privacy commissioner, in which he comes down on video surveillance.
Third, the cameras are ruled illegal.
Canada has a privacy commissioner who is independent of the government and police and who has one overriding concern above all else: ensuring that the constitutional privacy rights of the Canadian public are respected.
In the past, he's also prevented the government from creating a super database that merges all information from all sources -- police, medical, political, taxation, etc -- into one system. So ruled because it would make it far too easy for the various branches of government to look at data they shouldn't have access to.
Thank goodness Canada's got the foresight and commonsense to have an independent commissioner!
--
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Check out this paper by Chen and Williams. In this work done back at Apple in '93 they describe how to create intermediate camera angles from multiple static images.
Of course, the capacity to fly around the scene in real time had to wait until computers got a lot faster.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The Sarnoff corporation has more information available on their homepage, including a downloadable video clip of the the flashlight in action; available here.