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NASA to Start Helping Detectives
Roland Piquepaille writes "With a new photographic laser device developed to check damages on the Space Shuttle, NASA is going to help the FBI to investigate crime scenes. The Laser Scaling and Measurement Device for Photographic Images (LSMDPI) was designed to provide a non-intrusive means of adding a scale to a photograph, which is very useful when looking at an object in space when there is no size reference. But the LSMDPI, which weighs only a half-pound and can be attached directly to a camera's tripod, will also be used on Earth in crime and accident scene investigations. It also could be used for oil and chemical tank monitoring or aerial photography."
This pattern appears in the photograph along with the image of the object under investigation, enabling the viewer to measure the size of the object
This will take pornography to a new level!Seriously though, this seems like a very neat idea. It's like embedding a topographical map within a photo to give it a more 3 dimensional perspective.
I really think this technology would apply very well to image recognition applications. I'm thinking of the recent article on China's facial recognition surveillance program. Right now, it relies on using multiple camera angles to determine shapes and sizes of facial features. According to this article, it sounds like zapping a few lasers at someone's face would provide even more accurate measurements.
As far as other image recognition research goes, I know there are many techniques and complex sensors used to obtain accurate depth perception for autonomous AI agents. I think something like this would help a lot. Sort of like a bat navigating with sound, except it would be a robot navigating with lasers =).
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
DUPE! Bush ordered the NSA to help out with domestic law enforcement over two years ago.
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...when NASA is looking for you from Space.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So when is Steve Jobs going to announce this new product? I'm surprised Apple haven't entered the digital depth photography business a long time ago. It's about time NASA start releasing taxpayer-funded technology back into the marketplace. :P
Bet they use one of these babies in their detective work.
At last! A real-world use for the internet.
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...or is this a simple as "we've got two lasers a known distance from one another and they shoot in the same direction"? I mean, who couldn't have come up with this "invention"? At least it's not a software patent...
Speaking of which, how long before someone breaks one by sitting on it and trying to scan their butt?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Put a fork in it. That franchise is done already.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Or, this is one more example of the wonderful technology that comes out of space research and something NASA should make more prominent. Going to space is not just about exploring the stars, it is investing in scientific research that has a very wide array of potential uses far beyond that.
NASA should really have a PR campaign highlighting everything we take fro granted that came from space research.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
The Laser Scaling and Measurement Device for Photographic Images (LSMDPI) was designed to provide a non-intrusive means of adding a scale to a photograph, which is very useful when looking at an object in space when there is no size reference.
I can just see the new spam now:
Want your equipment to look bigger from space?
try SeeAlice today...
"Well, thanks to the LSMDPI there was clearly some serious file sharing going on here. Just look at the massive damage those copyrights have suffered!"
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from NASA.
Could very well create in industry that pays more in taxes then it cost to develop. Like so many other spinoffs.
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"CSI: Low Earth Orbit - Las Vegas"
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This kind of thingy is somewhat less useful and accurate than a "ruler" in the picture:
- You have to calibrate the laser dot spacing against a ruler anyway, so you don't save the cost or weight of carrying around a ruler.
- The calibration is only good at ONE distance and perpendicular to the lasers.
- Rulers and tape measures can be used to measure other things, that lasers can't- like skew distances, or circumferences.
- Rulers always show up as the right brightness on a photograph. Lasers have to be adjusted in brightness to match the scene, and may wash out if a flash is used.
- Red laser light is not too visible if the object is like, red, or covered with blood.
Don't go put all your money on this company.. oh wait...This violates my sacred rights of privacy! Think of the children! Aaargh!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Yeah, like Tang!
I've seen this technique used for imagery (video and still images) from deep-sea submersibles/ROVs for years (as one example that others are somewhat likely to have seen, watch for the twin red dots in many of the underwater scenes in "Aliens of the Deep" - which, I just realized, was done in cooperation with NASA). It kind of sucks when you see a new formation/organism/whatever, take pictures, then realize you have absolutely no way of telling how big it is when you look at the images later.
indoors.
Shagadelic?
The idea is way cool, but the technolgy is almost too simple! This, however, is a good thing... as we oftentimes neglect the simple, elegant, and effectieve solutions that spring up when we NEED them.
:)
Its not quite a new concept, but I'd really like to see this, along with other technolgies, implemented into my plain old digital camera (PODC)
I think a lot of people could benefit from knowing the scale of images taken with their camera.... More useful, howerver, would be if the laser beams used an invisible but detecable frequency of light that would not interfere with the original image...Of course the camera would somehow have to record this information or figure it out in image processing and record it as meta-data... but that would be useful.
We've already seen built in WIFI, now I want to see built in "Supporting data" solutions that include, but are not limited to: GPS information, time and data information, orientation (in the 3d plane) as well as perhaps motion / scale information.
While this supporting data is not necessarily immediately useful it just might lend a hand to those crazy projects that aim to use interpolation and extrapolation techniques to build realtime 3d representations of what they think is going on based on what they've seen going on! (As an example, assume that you have a time sequenced series of photos taken by a digital camera at the center of the room. These images can be "stitched" together to create a 3d virtual space (nothing new). Now add a ball rolling from one corner of the room to another. It is possible to interpolate / extrapolate data that would allow us to create a virtual "video" showing the ball rolling across the room based on REAL velocities and predicted trajectories... cool huh? I don't know much about those projects, but I'm almost certain that having SCALE information would help things out a lot.... this, as well as more complex situatations where the camera is moving in 3D space.
--Matthew Wong
http://www.themidofmatthew.com
Maybe you and the laser should go get a freakin room.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Can it core a apple, oh Chef of the Future?
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" It diverts huge amounts of investment from the private sector to do so."
Actaully I agree with you for the most part. I'm thinking of scientific research in general terms here. As far as i know, NASA does not do everything in house, it diverts enourmous mounts of work to the private sector. For example, consider the moonlanders were made by Grumman not NASA. They were working for NASA. So your point about money going to NASA vs the private sector is not valid since there is no clear distinction between the two.
You candy bar analogy is also not valid. I would consider it more like me asking you to invest money in my company and doing a PR campaign to show what you get back for that money ie make a good product and advertise it so that more people will throw money at you.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
If this could help monitor, say, oil tanks, then why doesn't NASA license the technology out to oil companies for exorbitant fees? It might help provide funding to get some important projects, ahem, off the ground.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Cue the Bladerunner jokes...
It's not much of a technology. That's called "structured light", and it's been used for years in industrial computer vision systems. It's one of the simplest ways to measure depth in an image.
It's not even new to law enforcement. Here's a PowerPoint presentation on using it to look at stamped logos in pills. This is from a 2004 conference in Dallas.
A "Technical Support Package" (PDF) is available as well.
--Tim
Oh great, another issue for the liberals to get their panties in a knot.
I wonder how long it will take for All Franken to start whining about this on his radio show, annoying both his listeners as he whimpers about what a misuse of technology this is, and what a horrible miscarriage of justice it entails.
An Uncomfortable Truth
- Two Trident Underwater laser pointers (~$30.00 ea.)
- Epoxy or rubber silicone them to a block which can attach to camera mount.
Of course you expoy them while they are aligned. We do this with their dots at 2 1/2". This setup gives very accurate measurements well over 40' (that is, beyond the point at which you can even really see in a photo anything that small).The drag is that NASA also has a mandate to try to make money with the tools they develop. NASA scientists developed a great image analysis program called VISAR back in 1996 to clean up video for the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing. Since then, they've been trying to sell it to companies. To my knowledge, this has never appeared in a consumer-priced product - only in a $100k+ system to be sold to big police departments, the FBI/CIA and big casinos.
I can never justify the megabucks Intergraph system, nor can the hundreds of smaller police departments or sheriff's departments. The money that went into the NASA budget from Intergraph is a tiny amount compared to the value to the public at large of releasing this under an open source licence. If it was opened, Intergraph could still sell packaged systems (this still requires decent processor power) and support. But it could appear in free stand-alone tools, in video editing systems and in secutity systems.
Currently, a huge amount of security video that could be analyzed in this way is not, because of the cost. Making this free could save lives.
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You candy bar analogy is also not valid. I would consider it more like me asking you to invest money in my company and doing a PR campaign to show what you get back for that money ie make a good product and advertise it so that more people will throw money at you.
That's funny, but no one has ever asked me to invest money in NASA before. The government just kind of took the money away from me, without giving me a choice.
So, how do I sell my shares? How can I opt out of purchasing any more shares? Is NASA going to be willing to regulated by the Securities Exchange Commission? Is NASA going to be broken up into smaller companies by the FTC?... after all, it is a monopoly?
Hmmm... somehow I have trouble grasping your whole "investment" analogy.
A better analogy would be if someone pointed a gun to my head, and stole my money... and then promoted his wife's new diamond ring as a "spinoff technology".
Last summer I was researching lichen and using them to detect changes in the environment. We needed to measure their surface area and used a similar apparatus for doing so. Except, instead of photographing the laser, as the article suggests, we shot them at the lichen and used some calculus to grab surface area.
So NASA is still operating in non-metric units, they created a laser measuring device which TFA suggests is measured with software outputting non-metric units though we don't know if they use the decimal system or say 1/16 inch, they had to be requested to add SI (systeme internationale, or metric) units, TFA has to explain what SI units are, TFA then uses the ambiguous word English which in measurements usually indicates non-metric, bushel and foot-pound quaintness even beyond the American units. Maybe NASA doesn't feel comfortable with SI and so is trying not to standardize on it or appear to be an expert on it? When's the next bit of space hardware due to get a nervous breakdown due to a need for inches and degrees fahrenheit?
If you don't like how your tax money is spent, and you've exhausted the political avenues for change, you could always "vote with your feet", i.e., leave. Find a country that doesn't spend tax money on scientific research, or better yet, doesn't have an income tax at all.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
... in an episode of "Numbers" or "CSI" or some show of that type?
Actually, I was going to say that this isn't all that surprising, considering that the US Administration seems to be obsessed with "security", and that NASA is having it's funding cut to the point where they can barely do what they're famous for, let alone all the side projects. It does make some sense for them to start producing surveillance- and detection-related (as opposed to security) technology. Somehow I suspect the pure scientists who admire NASA probably won't be as happy about this as detectives will.
Actually, satellites (like Hubble at least) use infrared and other cameras probably more than visible light cameras. Indoors isn't that much safer. Neither is underground, unless you go really far down.
This has been used for some time on submersibles. You will quite frequently see two, three, or four laser dots in video from submarines and ROVs.
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