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Airport Video Surveillance Goes Hi-Tech
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on new tech used in the airport of Helsinki to monitor behavior and alert people when predefined situations arise. From the article: "The system can alert staff to events which may need further investigation without the need for every camera to be observed by staff. For example, suspect packages or vehicles left unattended will be flagged up and staff alerted. Similarly if the system detects queues growing beyond a pre-defined length in the security zone staff will be alerted of the need to open another lane""
Similarly if the system detects queues growing beyond a pre-defined length in the security zone staff will be alerted of the need to open another lane.
Can't the actual human employees at the head of the line make this determination and alert whomever has the authority to open another lane? Seems like a solution looking for a problem if you ask me.
... when I see a line of 500 densely-packed people waiting to go through an X-ray machine intended to prevent somebody from blowing up a plane loaded with 200 densely-packed people.
"Security theatre," indeed.
Your statement just raised another security problem -- As public are made known of these High-Tech-Knows-It-All cameras, they might be relying more on these for protection, rather than the good-old common sense.
TouristA: Hmm... that suitcase over there has been left alone for a while
TouristB: Don't worry, I'm sure it'll be picked up soon by the security camera.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
Airport security in the US, under the TSA, is anything but prevention. Its a stupid feel good charade. It would be better let to a machine to make false positives because at least then you know its not being done out of spite or bias as is now.
I have never figured out why my mother (63 years old) gets singled out at the security checkpoints as often as she does. Twice she was stopped because of the dog carrier (small dog - soft carrier) - once because she had to explain that you cannot put the carrier through the x-ray machine with the dog in it.
The real reason to find a way to let a machine make the call is because at least it can be viewed as impartial. It would be about the only way to have security instead of political correct neutered "security" we have now. Then again, in the US at least how can we have airport security if we don't even bother to police our own borders?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
How about: lighting changes (sun comes out / goes in), shadows cast by passing objects, reflections from moving objects, camera auto-gain triggered by scene composition changes, camera noise, white-out.
Big problem. You can make it work some of the time...
rt
Based on my first hand experience as a Finn, I must say we do tolerate diversity very well. But there is a difference between not tolerating diversity and profiling suspects. Look at the photographs of people who have committed terrorist attacks in the last few years. See from which countries they come from. What is their religion. Thirty years ago, when the Baader-Meinhof gang was a terrorist threat, people with pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes were tagged as terrorist suspects as well.
Of course, the fact that fundamentalist Islamic terrorists have black hair and olive skin doesn't mean that everyone with that description is a terrorist, but when the police must find a few terrorists among six billion people it helps if they can narrow their search somehow. One terrorist among a billion people is still a needle in a haystack, but it's six times easier to find him with an ethnic profile than without one.