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Prototype System Blocks Digital Cameras
lee1 writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have completed a prototype
device that can block digital
cameras. The team in the Interactive and Intelligent Computing division of
the Georgia Tech College of Computing used off-the-shelf equipment
(camera-mounted sensors, lighting equipment, a projector and a computer) to
scan for, find and neutralize digital cameras. The system works by looking for
the reflectivity and shape of the image sensors and saturating them with a
thin beam of visible white light.
The principal applications are expected to be protecting areas such as
government buildings and trade shows against clandestine photography, stopping
unauthorized amateur photography of, for example, shopping-mall Santas
(really!) and defeating video copying in theaters.
The countermeasure: film." Sounds perfect for copyrighted public spaces.
After seeing a lady manhandled and her camera destroyed at a prince concert. I can now see something like this being very profitable. Most concerts don't allow cameras. But people sneek them in all the time. especially camera phones.
This might be practical for simply preventing happy snappers from taking photos of things you'd rather not, but I fail to see how this will prevent determined people from getting the pictures. For starters, a long tight baffle attached to the lens of a conceiled camera would be very difficult for the system to pick up on, *and* it would be very difficult for the light beam to get to the lense as well.
The more practical and up-front approach would be to x-ray everybody and take their cameras off them.
New System to Counter Photo and Video Devices
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on 19:01 19th September, 2005
from the movie-studios-rejoice dept.
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."
If it's not a dupe, it's certainly a very close article, which should occur in the "Related Links section". Yay! for my l33t search skillz.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
all you would need is a good quality polarizer filter.. they already exist and to be honest .. i never take mine off. although i use a DSLR so this stuff would be useless already.. but that is mute.
if you have a polarizer then the light they are sending out woln't be able to see the ccd unless you are trying to take a picture OF the light emiter.. and even then the reciver would more than likly not see the reflection let alone be able to tell the shape of the reflection as it would more than likly be distorted
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Unless you eye reflects light like a camera CCD, you don't have to worry. The system targets a specific type of camera - not just shooting light randomly everywhere...
"But this one goes to 11!"
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/06/687.asp
http://pubsindex.trb.org/document/view/default.asp ?lbid=776666
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/technology/circu its/06came.html?en=8bc6df38e1042a40&ex=1262667600& amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;am p;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;ei=5090&partner= rssuserland&pagewanted=print&position=
Oh and they forget that a glasses wearer will also look like a camera
No, they don't. This system detects the CCD in a camera, not the lens. That's why it doesn't work with SLRs.
Your eye IS retroreflective. Not to the same extent as a cat's, but it is. A darkened theatre has perfect conditions for demonstrating it too.
I suspect that the angle of effective retroreflection for a human eye would be at least equal to the retroreflection angle of a CCD with a reasonably long lens in front of it.
So again, we come down to shape (as you mentioned from TFA), which is going to require some pretty high resolution (ie expensive) cameras if they want to be able to zap the guy sitting in the last row of a movie theatre with a camcorder.
Not to mention any decent digital camera has an infrared blocking filter, of course.
Yes, I do.
several in fact.
http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/11185/fish-sto ries-from-the-operators-of-traffic-scameras.html
http://thenewspaper.com/news/11/1189.asp
http://thenewspaper.com/news/01/117.asp
and that took me 10 minutes to dig up.
We said the same thing. :-)
The only thing I added that was different is that the process we described is a lot more movement than is currently done to expose a single frame. I'm not sure if the mechanism can do all of this quickly. The shutter is very quick in both directions and dontrolled very precisely. The other stuff.. I'm not sure.
Clearly the one rule that has changed that motivated the SLR designs we have today is the film (CCD in this case) cannot be touched by any light at all other than the exposure of the frame. This rule has changed since the CCD can be hit with light all of the time. Hmm.. there is another snag here. You can't hit the CCD with too bright of light. They can be damaged by too bright of light too frequently. Or at least some can. This would work for a small aperature, but not a big one. I wonder how P&S handle this? Guess the answer is out there and I just don't know enough about it.
There are a ton of Rebel hacks out there. It might be worth hitting the community for hacking the Rebel to see what control they have. I know they've made a lot of great improvements to annoyances. Unfortunately for me the annoyances of all Digital SLRs cannot be changed with firmware. What bugs me most with all Digital SLRs is from a user interface perspective they are high tech P&S cameras and not SLRs. I'd prefer to have the user controls optimized for manual control with deep menu options for automated "idiot modes" as I like to call them. It only makes sense to bury the automated modes in the menus because people set the mode they'll be using for a long time and leave them. Where people that like the full manual control want to keep the object framed and just twitch a few fingers to set the camera where it should be. The only *extra* I care about with my Digital Rebel that's anything beyond a pure manual is the HUD and built in meter display on the HUD.
Anyway... I'm digressing from the main thread here.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.