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Gunshot Tracking Cameras to be Deployed in LA
apok04 writes "Get out your tinfoil hats (and ski masks). A USC engineer uses his expertise with nerve cells to create a surveillance system that can recognize the sound of a nearby gunshot - and identify the shooter. In a unique pilot program, L.A. and Chicago will deploy test units in high-crime areas. The creator emphasizes that the system cannot recognize voices or words, but his previous research into speech recognition systems suggests otherwise."
The system can then locate, precisely, where the shot was fired, turn a camera to center the shooter in the camera viewfinder and make a 911 call to a central police station.
If the shooter is still there, she deserves to be caught.
According to the article, this device is listening for the entire sound pattern of the gunshot, not just the initial explosion, which makes it much less likely to mistake other loud noises for shooting.
So it may be difficult to fool it unless you can also simulate the whole shooting sequence (think of Matrix's bullet time).
I guess FPS game developers can use one of these to create realistic gunshot sounds.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
what if they shoot the camera?
If the surveilance system will determine who fired before it ceases to function due to gunshot damage.
Get out your tinfoil hats
Why?
Doesn't seem like a bad idea to know who's shooting who - don't you think?
In unrelated news, sources report that knive sales have skyrocketed in recent days. No plausible explanation could be found.
Well I guess that just means its time to switch over to my golfball gun or spudgun... Bwa ha ha ha
The LAPD has also promised a speedy patch to adress the widespread camera control issues in the first release.
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I don't really know if this is a good or bad thing. I like the idea of having people caught quickly but at the same time I feel that law enforcement agencies would quickly find a way to constantly monitor the cameras, cutting into our privacy even more. Since these cameras are in public it doesn't bother me as much.
Over all I think it's a good idea but it will be exploited so I can't support it fully, even though I'd like to.
An increase in gun-silencers sales has been reported.
I just hope they make it multiplayer and include a deathmatch mode. Also, does the system support skinning?
M
As I recall it turned out that the company doing this was closely affiliated with one of the local politicos and the system was basically bunk. I don't remember how it all played out, but maybe someone else out there does?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
This can accurately determine where a gun shot was fired, which is useful, I suppose. But, in the article it states that a camera is used to identify and track the culprit. In order to deter gun related crime properly, there'd have to be cameras EVERYWHERE.
*puts on tinfoil hat*
Big Brother is watching!
Machine sounds are the only ones in SENTRI's vocabulary. It cannot eavesdrop on conversations, the scientist emphasized.
...because we're not done coding that yet, you've got at least another few years.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
So this thing is going to take my picture everytime my '78 Ford Pinto backfires? Sheesh, I think I really do need a tinfoil hat (or a new car).
Man on street yells: "Allah Ackbar!!! Allah Ackbar!!!!!". ."
*Directional Finder*: 1) TRIANGULATING... 2) AIMING... 3) FIRING BULLET!
Man on street: "Allah *BAM* Ackkkkkkbahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrr!!gurgl..lee..l.
SCENE 2
Woman on street whispers to friend: "I hate that dumb idiot Bush"
*Directional Finder*: 1) TRIANGULATING... 2) AIMING... 3) FIRING MIND CONTROL BEAM!
Woman on street whispers to friend: "I.... I... love Bush... and I love Jesus, SUVs, large corporations, and I agree with the righteousness of preemptively saving the rest of the world from themselves and their oil. Let's go shopping."
I remember seeing a system like this years ago. I'm quite sure in the 1980's! Possibly on that Beyond 2000 science show from Australia (we get weird shows here sometimes). I wondered why it was never used it seems like a great invention.
Why so long to get a system like this produced?
Put it in Iraq attached to a machine gun, calibrated to shoot at the sound of an AK-47 not an M16. Since it seems to be able to tune out other explosive noises why not refine it ever further to just a certain gun type?
The device is listening for the entire sound pattern of the gunshot, not just the initial explosion, which makes it much less likely to mistake other loud noises for shooting.
Uh, no, it doesn't. The fact that the guy has worked on different types of signal processing doesn't "suggest" that he builds those capacities into every project he touches.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Correct, there are systems in place that can detect gunshots and make an approxomation of where the shooting took place, but according to the article:
"A microphone surveillance system now is using his insights to recognize - instantly, and with high accuracy - the sound of a gunshot within a two-block radius. The system can then locate, precisely, where the shot was fired, turn a camera to center the shooter in the camera viewfinder and make a 911 call to a central police station."
So, this system can locate exactly where a shot was fired, as well as turn local cameras in the area of the shot towards the shooter.
During the initial studies the camera was placed in front of a TV with Star Wars on it. The sophisticated equipment could still not tell who shot first between Greedo or Han.
So how does it deal with multiple gunshots coming from different shooters? (i.e., gunfight)
I can see that camera jumping back and forth trying to catch each shot.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Fine, so it detects the sound. Minimize the volume of the sound, or change the profile of that sound, and the shot becomes less-likely to be detected. A suppressor would help in the former, but I'm not sure about the latter (any experts?).
Suppressors are not difficult to manufacture, after all, although it's a felony to do so (or to possess one), in violation of the 1934 National Firearms Act...
Predictions:
1) monitoring devices get destroyed and/or hacked, and/or
2) suppressors increase in popularity, and/or
3) alternate means of killing (knives, swords, blowguns, etc.) increase in popularity
or,
4) nothing changes, except more shooters are detected
Anyway, just because the microphone's input is piped to a neural-net program which detects gunshots does not mean the input cannot *also* be outputted to a file, or to speakers on a computer, etc..
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Just ban the guns and the problem will go away!!!
!!!
I picture the camera rotating so fast it turns to butter as all the idiots fire their guns up in the air on new years eve.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Not to mention any potential problem they have with backfiring cars...
In a unique pilot program, L.A. and Chicago will deploy test units in high-crime areas.
Hmmm... Let me guess, the south side of Chicago and Compton?
Rather than looking for pro-active solutions to lowering crime in lower-income neighborhoods, like good education systems, quality health-care, living wages, etc. we continue to see crazy-ass reactive schemes like the above camera system that don't do anything to solve the real problems. In the meantime, as these useless systems become the norm, our society moves closer and closer to the ultimate police heaven, where everyone is monitored every second of every day. When's it gonna end?
Hey, golly-gee-whiz, it sure is a neat technology, Wally.
But like most things of that sort, no one's actually thought about how it actually makes things better, or how it can make things worse. So you catch a few people shooting guns, so what? They end up in jail, their families get torn apart, their chances of actually becoming a productive part of society diminish and they end up back on the street shooting a gun again, which is caught on camera, etc. etc. etc. Wow, crime sure is decreasing now.
It's nice to talk about being tough on crime, but oftentimes what's really needed is not the cracking of a whip, or the monitoring of a camera, but rather a signature on a diploma, or on a paycheck. If you start suspecting everyone as a criminal, then they start seeing themselves as criminals and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you first look at people as raw material that can be shaped and molded into something productive, well, you see what I'm getting at.
I'm getting sick of reading about high-tech crime monitoring systems, but it's appearing to be inevitable that we will live with them in our daily lives now and in the near future, so let me practice my indoctrination recitation:
"I for one, welcome our all-seeing camera overlords."
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Let's get those combat robots getting sent to Iraq to drive around our cities and automatically counter attack any shooters..... After that all we need is a seriously deranged computer running the whole show and we've got a science fiction movie!
The profile for a voice is much different from that of a gunshot, and creating a multi-purpose system to do this would make both perform much worse.
Also speech recognition knowledge is very different from speaker recognition (one cares about what the person says regardless of how they say it, the other cares about how they say it regardless of what it is). The mathematical models for both are very different.
Also the microphones are likely specialized in the wrong frequency/volume range to be useful for speaker authentication.
What will they do with all those photos of people with wide grins standing next to loudspeakers?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
1917 ish. Somebody in the Canadian Expeditionary Force to WWI figured out how to accurately direct counter artillery fire using two human ears, a telephone and some trigonometry. The Germans never did figure out why they couldn't fire more than a round or two before they got nailed.
A buddy of mine and I did this in a physics lab. We used an array of 5 condenser mics wired into a PC running LabView, wired out to a laser pointer mounted on some toy motors.
Someone would clap 15-30 feet away, and the computer pointed the laser pointer at their hands. We got the position within a foot or so, even in a echoing cinder block room.
Insights:
- You need at least 4 mics to get an object's position. (There are 4 degrees of freedom, x, y, z, and time) If you only need the angle, then you need 3 (for time, theta, and phi).
- There are some places to shoot where due to the symmetries, it would be hard to compute a position. If the mics are arranged in a plane, then one problem area is straight out from the mic, normal to the plane.
- Another project group in my class developed a computer-controlled ball bearing cannon. I wish we had time to link the projects.
- Thermal variation in the air can disrupt your results.
- If you used well-tuned directional mics, you might be better off. Rather than compute the location based on the path-length of the sound to each mic, you could then find out the incident angle of the sound on each mic, based upon how much the sound level is reduced.
And if you're doing nothing illegal, the police and/or government won't care either, and they'll keep on listening for others.
Unfortunately, the police and/or government are also responsible for defining which activities are illegal, and are increasingly oriented toward keeping their own actions secret in the name of 'security'. There is quite literally no public accountability for much of the security apparatus closing into place right before our eyes, and when even a congresswoman is unable to obtain the federal regulations authorizing someone to search them, something is really fucking wrong.
Additionally, individual members of the police and/or government are uniquely vulnerable to corruption, hiding their betrayal behind the shield of 'security' and 'need to know'.
The tired old 'Law-abiding people have nothing to hide' argument needs to roll over and die already. The only workable safeguard against government hypersurveillance is ensuring that the system is constructed in a completely transparent and publicly-accountable manner.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Machine sounds are the only ones in SENTRI's vocabulary. It cannot eavesdrop on conversations, the scientist emphasized.
Bullshit...
Innocent people are still vulnerable to harassment, intimidation, and coercion from agents acting on behalf of the government.
When the watchers are the only ones with access to the results of a given surveillance technology, nobody can watch the watchers to see whether they're abusing it.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Here's an evaluation. Median location error is about 25 feet. That at least gets it down to two or three houses.
I met the designer of this system some years ago. The original prototype worked using microphones and hard-wired phone connections for each microphone. The signal from each microphone was transmitted using an analog FM carrier system over the phone line designed to trade frequency response for dynamic range. The system had terrible audio frequency response but huge dynamic range, so that pulse events like gunshots come through cleanly without overload. When you have enough dynamic range, gunfire is easy to recognize, because the leading edge of the pulse is so sharp. Few other sounds have that form.
The microphones are up on telephone poles and atop buildings, and they're omnidirectional. So they mostly pick up loud bangs, wind, and aircraft noise. The original pole units were entirely analog, phone line powered, and very dumb. The original central processing system was a PC with some data acquisition cards running LabView. Since then, it's become fancier, with better integration with mapping programs and transmission of gunfire locations to PDA-type devices. But it's not really very complicated.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
There are those who are poor, but doing the best they can, trying to create a better life. Then there are those who see nothing wrong with shooting other people. The latter is more likely to be poor, but includes all classes. (drugs are often involved, but they don't have to be)
The first group is who we should help. They are best helped by allowing them to live their life in peace. Allowing their children to get an education. Allowing them to walk to work safely. While their schools might not be as good as what the rich go to, they are good enough that you can get into Ivy League schools if you study hard, a requirement even the rich kids have to meet. (scholarships mean that you can pay for it)
I suspect there's an organization of trolls that generate this kind of claptrap.
Unlike you, I actually live in a neighborhood which is affected by gun violence. At this moment, one drug dealer from my block has been murdered, and one is a level A paraplegic (no feeling or movement from the neck down - and good riddance). A number of others have been shot, or shot other people.
In the current system, criminals have a number of technological resources at their disposal, which most pseudo-liberals ignore:
cell phones - these make traditional street gangs unnecessary. For instance, nowadays threats like "I can burn your house down with one phone call" (Mr. Paraplegic, above), are more common than traditional turf wars. Police used to have an advantage, with radios vs. landline POTS. This advantage no longer exists - in fact, Police IDEN frequencies are even intermixed with the criminals' Nextel walkie-talkies, making jamming very difficult.
automobiles - there was a time when one could read the license plates on cars before they hit 60 mph. That time is past. Shoot-and-run in a car is now a major criminal tool. The remedies, gunshot location systems, and neartime video recording, are hardly new ideas - I sketched out a similar system several years ago.
trauma centers - the old days of "bang bang, you're dead" have been supplanted by endless round-trips to be revived at the taxpayers' expense. It's not uncommon now to arrest people with guns, artificial limbs, and colostomy bags. The ones they can't put back on the street end up as 24-hour care, with their friends going out to do the dirty work.
guns - handguns now go through most building walls. Assault weapons are available and are easily converted to machine guns.
police dispatch - this hasn't changed in 100 years. To summon police, one dials a number, waits for an answer, then gives a verbal description of the suspect and the vehicle. At 30 wpm, this amounts to several minutes of descriptive prose before the cops have any idea of who shot who and what color and make of car they drove away in. By that time, the Lexus is 2-3 miles away. The reality is that you can shoot digicam video of your entire family and mail it around the world in the time it takes to get the cops to answer the phone (that's Idea II - dispatch systems that actually take email, cameraphones, and other media).
Don't think the criminals don't know how f**ked up the current system is. Many just drive around and spend 5 minutes at each location; the cops can't respond in that time frame.
I never read anything about corruption regarding ShotSpotter, nor did I find any mentions in news archives.
The article I found just mentions that there was significant debate in Redwood City before buying the system from Trilon for $85K. "Opponents, however, claim it is a boondoggle and that the money could be better spent elsewhere, such as on hiring more police officers." (SFChronicle, 3/18/97, "Redwood City Endorses Gunshot Locator System")
The National Institute of Justice funded a study of the ShotSpotter system in Redwood City and Dallas.
The December 1999 report can be found on the NIJ website:
http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/179274.pdf
The report compared Alliant's SECURES system in Dallas to Trilon's ShotSpotter system in Redwood City.
It sounds like they had a lot of fun with this test in RWC:
Dallas chose not to allow the firing of blank rounds on random street corners:
If you're wondering why Redwood City would be picked, keep in mind that neighboring East Palo Alto had the highest per capita murder rate in the country after a string of drug murders in 1992. (The homicide rate is lower now.)
The NIJ report page is pretty entertaining reading: