Slashdot Mirror
New System to Counter Photo and Video Devices
Incongruity writes "News.com is reporting that a team from Georgia Tech has developed and demoed a system that actively searches for and effectively blinds cameras and camcorders within a 10 meter radius." From the article: "In this system, a device bathes the region in front of it with infrared light. When an intense retroreflection indicates the presence of a digital camera lens, the device then fires a localized beam of light directly at that point. Thus, the picture gets washed out."
Paparazzi Shields for famous celebrities. It's like a force field!
Can't wait to see how many people will go blind with this contraption!
She lit a match and felt the warm glow of its meager heat before it burned down to her fingers and she dropped it in the snow. Then she lit another and another until all her matches were gone and she began to feel icy fingers of winter clutching at her tiny frail frame.
She moved along the street looking for an open door, shelter, any shelter. Then she thought, what's this? She felt a deep warmth the likes of which she had not felt since her mother's embrace. It was glorious. She sat down to rest and soon fell asleep.
And thus it came to pass, she was found roast to a golden brown, like a Thanksgiving turkey, before the offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Big deal. International Rescue had them already, 30 years ago, to protect strangers from photographing the Thunderbirds.
The next step is a video/still camera that detects an infrared source and closes an iris to keep the light from bouncing back. Or better yet, a coating that keeps the infrared from bouncing out of the lens.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
I'm gonna get like 10 for every room 'cause I know you're watching and trying to keep me from talking about the Alie^H^H ...mmmmpppph
[Remote Peer Quit Unexpectedly]
now the police can give the beat downs without any fear of being caught
back in the day we didnt have no old school
A remote control will blind a camera in night shot mode, but it won't blind anybody. It can actually make a pretty cool looking lens flare, depending on the remote and the camera... I wouldn't be too worried.
Thanks goodness, no one has invented the infrared filter!
Am I wrong, or does this seem too easy to defeat?
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Or a potential fuck you *from* anyone who doesn't want the public to be able to document them. Immagine if these were used to keep any non-approved journalists from taking pictures/recording events? Or used to cover an entire area where a protesters are demonstrating to make covering the event harder?
There's still other details to work out, like the armed guards, the exploding ink in the money packets, etc., but I'm glad those Georgia engineers solved one of my problems.
Read the goddamn article:
How it works
The Georgia Tech system essentially exploits the "retroreflective" property of digital camera lenses. When light strikes a retroreflective surface, a portion of the light bounces back to the original source. While eyeglasses, bottles, watches and other glass surfaces are retroreflective, a coating on virtually all digital camera lenses puts cameras in a class of their own.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
And, of course, the eyes of some animals (cats, alligators) are strong and precise retroreflectors.
People, too.
That's why you get "red eye" in the picture if the flash is too close to the lens.
For people it's probably a vestigial remmanant.
For animals it's a night-vision adaptation. The retro-reflector is behind the light-sensitive part of the retina. Any light that makes it through the sensors is sent back (nearly) the way it came in, giving the retina a second chance to catch it and thus a tad under a 3db increase in sensitivity - at a slight cost to focus. The shine you see is what made two passes without being caught.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
you better patent that quick...
A group of cameras are arranged in a ring formation, with their lenses facing inward. Typically, this ring is raised up about 10' or so above the ground, and the cameras aimed down toward a common area. Each camera's lens has a donut shaped ring mounted to it. The donut's surface is covered either red or ir emitting led. The light from these leds floods the capture area (the volume) and bounces off of reflective markers which are attached to the actors inside the volume. The cameras, which are IR sensitive pick up the markers, and a computer then uses the feeds from multiple cameras to triangulate the positions of the markers.
Anyhow, the Vicon guy did say that its not a good idea to stare into the strobes, as it was probably not healthy for the eyes. The red ones are probably less unhealthy, as your pupils contract due to the visible light. The ir ones don't emit any visible light, and the only way to tell if a strobe as working was by a green led stuck among the ir ones.
Just to wrap up this mishmash of info, and to make a point, I don't think flooding areas with ir light is a good idea, as I did find myself getting headaches and eyestrain if we left the strobes running too long in the studio.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
mpaa wouldn't love it straight..
but companies selling snake oil to mpaa definetely will love this. it doesn't matter if it works or not for them either, it's not like random movie goers made versions that end up the net anyways but they could still sell 10k worth of equipment that does absolutely nothing as mandatory to every cinema there is, equipment that would not save mpaa one penny but would cost them tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. that's how mpaa and cinemas are REALLY losing money, by paying to people who sell them snakeoil to fix their "problem". like riaa is losing money by buying "copy protection" tech that doesn't really work at all nor could it ever increase their revenues even if it did.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The military already has lasers designed to temporarily blind you. Could you hook those up to some kind of eye-recognition software that would allow the laser to automatically target people's eyes? Could be useful in a firefight or ambush, although you would need some way to keep it from targeting your own troops.
I know I sugested that about a year ago here on slashdot. //yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137379&threshol d=0&commentsort=0&tid=158&tid=126&tid=153&tid=173& tid=155&tid=137&mode=thread&cid=11485581
Part of "No Pictures, Thanks" from 1/26/05
It's actualy easier, you just need a high powered IR source, such as a bunch of LED's,
the Cameras AGC automaticly adjusts so you turn totaly dark.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
In short, I doubt there's any deterimental health effects from this system.
Actually, strong IR light is bad for your eyes.
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2. Your glasses don't reflect IR, your camera lens does (actually, they all have an IR filter to prevent it reaching the CCD/CMOS).
Many types of glass do reflect IR light.
Think about it a little more, are glass or plastic eyeglass lenses really going to be made out of THAT different a material than glass or plastic camera lenses?
3. My optician is using some pretty bright light at my check-up. Enough to make a recording useless (read: saturate the CCD/CMOS), not enough to harm anyone.
It might appear bright, but you don't necessarily know what the spectra of the light actually looked like and therefore how much power was contained total.
Life is too short to proofread.
From my understanding, it uses infrared to detect if a CCD type camera is present then shoots visible light at the camera to wash out the image.
So why not use the infrared filter to prevent the detection of the CCD camera. Don't reflect the infrared light back to the detection device. Thus no camera detected and no visible light sent to wash out said camera.
In my (not so) humble opinion the law should treat tail-gaters as harshly as drunk drivers. There's no excuse for either and both are incredibly dangerous to other road users.
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Actually, they shouldn't. It is against the Geneva convention to use devices such as lasers to cause blindness. Death's okay. But blindness is verboten.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"