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Surveillance Cameras Get Smarter
kog777 writes to mention that the IB Times is taking a look at where surveillance camera technology is headed. Soon researchers tell us that cameras will be available that not only record, but are able to interpret what they see. "The advancements have already been put to work. For example, cameras in Chicago and Washington can detect gunshots and alert police. Baltimore installed cameras that can play a recorded message and snap pictures of graffiti sprayers or illegal dumpers. In the commercial market, the gaming industry uses camera systems that can detect facial features, according to Bordes. Casinos use their vast banks of security cameras to hunt cheating gamblers who have been flagged before."
> For example, cameras in Chicago and Washington can detect gunshots and alert police
Can they tell the difference between gunshots and recordings of gunshots played back on people's mobile phones? I think we're about to find out!
So, how is this going to make life change? Is big brother going to become a huge menace to society as a whole or is it going to make a better standard of living? I know all the scifi authors' opinions so I'd like to find out what are the positive sides of this?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Imagine a 10mx10m room that has cameras on many angles. You wear different colored gear on your head, upper arms, lower arms, chest, upper legs, lower legs, and your sword. You wear a light VR helmet. Inside the room spawns monsters that you have to fight off with your sword, while the cameras track where you are.
To me, the arcade died off because home technology caught up. These VR rooms will be the resurgence of the arcade when they become a reality.
God spoke to me.
I used to intern at ObjectVideo. They're a DARPA spin-off. I got to sit in the cubicle with all the PhDs and watch them as they used remote control cars to test their tracking cameras. Their products are really pretty stunning.
The basic idea is that if you have a complex with 100 security cameras, you're going to have half a dozen security guards sitting there looking at a huge bank of video feeds. Studies show that guards tend to just phase out after about twenty minutes anyway. So all those security cameras are really pretty worthless.
Instead, you run all the video feeds through a set of servers, the servers can detect moving objects and track them. It's more sophisticated than basic motion detection. They can differentiate between cars, dogs, trucks, boats, etc. They can even tell if you drop or pick up a bag, or throw something. Some applications of their technology can be used to monitor highways for instance: cars traveling north-to-south produce no alert, while cars traveling south-to-north set off the alarm.
This technology removes the human restriction on scale and overcomes the diminishing returns barrier to deploying huge huge banks of CCTVs all over a chemical plant, or military base, or corporate HQ, or national border.
(And as a side note, their IT guy was a real hard-ass about information security. He gave me a personal, one-on-one, 45 minute lecture about everything I wasn't allowed to do, or even think about doing, when I arrived. Guy had the place locked down tight, and easily out-nerded the dozen or so PhDs who were doing the actual coding and development. Just sat in the server room with the petabyte backup drives and listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. Hilarious.)
Would someone PLEASE adapt these new intelligent cameras to work with traffic lights? Cameras that can tell how much traffic is coming from each direction could move a lot more traffic. I can't count the amount of time I have wasted at red lights when there was NO traffic at all coming the other way. Intersections that can intelligently route traffic would be uber useful.
I'd think "switch view to camera that detects movement" would be a good-enough feature for most places. That would at least alert a live operator to a view where something MIGHT be going on.
>For example, cameras in Chicago and Washington can detect gunshots and alert police
I wonder if they can distinguish the sound of a gunshot from the sound of a recording of a gunshot...
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
lat time I checked, AI wasnt up to the task of discerning whether someone was spraying a wall with Lysol, or spray paint. or spraying with the intent to cover grafitti, or to add new grafitti.
Methinks someone is applying a generous dollop of wishful thinking.
Casinos use their vast banks of security cameras to hunt cheating gamblers
...meaning anybody that manages to win more than a couple of times. You know, once is happenstance, two is coincidence, three is getting your legs broken.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
So, when will the casinos install these to help track down those Konami slot machines with the subliminal messages?
Most sound effects / recordings of gunshots aren't accurate representations of the sound (aka, air pressure waves) produced when a gun actually goes off. They're more of an artists' interpretation of what the human mind thinks that a gun sounds like, based on what we remember them sounding like after we've heard one.
Most speakers can't accurately reproduce a gunshot, because they can't move enough air at one time to create the pressure wave. They play something that's more of a "boom," when in reality a gunshot is a sharp "crack" (followed by reverberations / reflections from the room or surrounding objects). Not being able to play the initial 'crack' very well, they over-emphasize the reverberations.
A 'gunshot sensor' would probably be a microphone or microphone-like device that was purposely de-sensitized so that it only received particularly loud, sharp sounds. You might be able to fool it with something explosive (like dry ice and water in a soda bottle), or where there was a significant release of pressure (car backfire), but most sound-reproduction systems wouldn't cut it -- they don't move that much air at once. Even with things like backfiring and explosions, you could probably filter them out if you wanted to, because I doubt they're the same when you really look at the waveforms (I suspect that the high pressure escaping from the small aperture of a gun's muzzle makes a very distinct sound from a car backfiring through the 1-2" muffler), even though they sound the same to a person, because we're not good at discriminating very loud, sharp sounds.
OT: I wonder what a nearby lightning strike "sounds" like to a microphone with the capacity to accurately measure the maximum amplitude of the sound?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Until I can sit back on the couch and poke claudia schiffer for $19.95 an hour, I could give a flying fuck about your immersive VR.
Prior to that I'll stick to VR simulations of car driving and 'mech combat.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, it didn't say "correctly interpret what they see." A camera which interprets every occurrence of red as blood, and that as indication of a crime, is still a camera which interprets what it sees, despite the fact that it will give alarm as soon as someone with a red bag comes into view.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I want to know how far out it is until we start seeing this type of technology like this on satellites. Imagine the government being able to watch a whole city from space for gun shots.
"Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination." -Terminator
Casinos would have us think that card counting is cheating.
"You wear different colored gear on your head, upper arms, lower arms, chest, upper legs, lower legs, and your sword. You wear a light VR helmet. Inside the room spawns monsters that you have to fight off with your sword..."
:P
Well, there's kind of a line between the sleek elegance of the Wiimote, and just flat-out looking like an idiot.
/* No Comment */
The tests of facial recognition technology in which the results have been made available (e.g., in airport security trials) have been failures. I'm pretty skeptical that there's anything of substance to this until I see some evidence. The intelligent student will readily observe that the casinos have a strong interest in having people believe that the technology can do this.
A tiny phone speaker isnt going to do it, but some of those thumper stereos they have in those neighborhoods just might set them off.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This has made firecrackers much MUCH more entertaining. *runs off to buy stock in black cat fireworks co.*
I could've done with some smart surveillance cameras on my property last night, some fucker stole my two mountain bikes :(
But the joke's partly on them, one of them was waiting to be junked, brakes shot, chain twisted, chainrings bent, tyres bald, bottom bracket does a very loud SKREEEEEEEE sound when you try and pedal and it weighed half a ton. The other was from Halfords.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Why a camera, when you can just put sensors in the ground ?
They're both less intrusive (only detect whether there's a car or not. Not get your face on a picture), and less vandalisable (they're under the ground, as oposed to a camera mounted on the ground).
We have a few of them around here.
Either on very-low traffic lanes, that normally have permanently red lights and only stop the rest of the traffic and turn green in the few case there's some one on them.
Or on normal traffic street, at night-time when there are less cars and you can turn green lights depending on traffic instead of alternating lights (during there's always traffic on both direction of the crossing and green light is just given alternately).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Some people around here (Southern California) are worse than tomcats when they see a wall. Out comes the spray can.
The resulting mess they leave makes the whole neighborhood look like a gang-infested slum.
I know several owners of block walls (including myself) who would love to go to the police department and check out a box to guard my wall and report directly to the dispatcher when it "sees" someone marking the wall, so the squad car can arrive and catch them in the act.
And maybe catch that guy who comes by and pees. It stinks something terrible for days after he does that. And leaves this weird looking stain too.
TBH this sounds like it would set a really bad precedent. Think about it, if the cameras are trusted to interpret what they see, then security guards stop being employed and noone is watching the video screens. But what if the camera malfunctions in some way, and ignores activity it should be alerting the law about. More to the point, imagine the problems if someone could hack the system - camera's report a terrorist threat at X location, and half the local police screams round to a house where they find an old lady singing to her dog. Meanwhile the other side of town, a bank gets robbed cos attention is diverted. I know this is the extremes of possibility, but I would only want to see this technology being adopted if people realise someone still needs to watch it....
"Everlasting peace will come to Earth when the last man kills the last but one." - Adolf Hitler
Imagine that... physically fit geeks!
Our work is so damned sedentary that its no wonder our bodies go to shit.
firing automatically when they recognize Sarah Connor?
I can see how your post might be seen as offtopic, but you're right on the money. The last sentence was pure British satire. Whether laws are there or not, it doesn't matter, they will be broken. I feel the only way to solve this is education. Teach these people to use their heads rather than their trigger-fingers. It can be done!
Induction loops suck. 95% of them aren't tuned to be sensitive enough to detect bikers (either the motorized or the human-powered variety). Bring on the cameras, please!
-b.
Dozens of posts so far and no one has pointed out that the camera seems to have nothing to do with this recognition at all. It's the computer (and its software) to which the camera is attached (even via a network when applicable) that is the important part of this puzzle. Casino's employ tons of security staff to watch the dozens of security screens/cameras. The same is true for police and DOT's also employ tons of people to watch their screens. These people are being paid to "interpret" the images that they see. This new development has nothing to do with the cameras, but rather the software on the attached computer that interprets the video images from the many cameras.
I have installed some IP cameras and some regular cameras with a 4 port card in my PC. To date I have not been able to find even basic, stable software for them.
Does anyone know where to get *any* decent software for security cams?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Well, fortunately for that, we have a heuristic for determining whether someone is spraying a wall with Lysol or spraying it with graffiti. It is a simple one, whereby a surface is considered defaced if and only if the following conditions are true: an object, moving against a section, leaves a single color or group of colors behind, which is still visible after the object which initiated such colorings left the screen.
*bows* Thank you, I'll take my Ph. D. in AI design now.
I submitted this exact story 26 hours ago, and it was rejected. Now it's published (submitted by another user). What happened in the last 24 hours that transformed the story from uninteresting to interesting?
Saw a very cool video demo the other day.
Problem: Gramma wins big at casino, takes winnings in cash (why not a cheque?? I dunno). Joe Badguy follows her into the parking lot; bops her on the head, takes money, drives away. Not enough security guards to watch 10 acres of parking lot, surveillance cameras inside the casino see Joe Badguy leaving Casino but can't prove he did crime.
Solution: smarter video. Two cameras, one for spotting, one for tracking. First camera is a wide angle view of the parking lot, with image processing to detect motion. It sees Gramma walk out in parking lot, tells second camera. Second Camera zooms in on Gramma and starts to follow her. First camera sees Joe Badguy enter parking lot. Second camera now switches back and forth 3 seconds Gramma, 3 seconds Joe Badguy. Joe Badguy bops Gramma etc. Second camera sees this closeup. Joe Badguy gets in his pick up truck. As soon as truck starts to move, motion detected and tracking camera zooms in tight on truck. License plate is clearly readable (active image stabilization = insane zoom levels). Gramma tells casino security she got mugged. Security gaurds review video, call police with description of Joe Badguy, vehicle description and license plate number. Cops bust Joe with Grammas purse still in truck.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Try out www.zoneminder.com
Hmmm... and what is going to physically come in contact with your sword so that it actually feels like you're hitting something? ...and how easy is it to eat hot pockets while wearing proposed helmet?
I think that tracking is the least of the problems faced when trying to implement VR, and really, is one that has already been solved and is used frequently in film and game production.
You're mostly correct about why the arcade died, but the only way to replace it is to come up with something that is just as novel and dynamic. Really, an arcade is just a big room... but it's loaded up with a lot of fun games and is generally a good place for nerds to hang out. At the VR arcade, you'd stand in line for an hour to play "Monster Whack" for ninety seconds. Laser tag, paintball, go carts, mini golf, and the like are all kind of cool to do every so often, but these places don't usually have the hang out factor nor the quick thrill factor that made the arcade successful.
Do some research and be prepared to spend some money. I'm going to guess that you got either an E-bay card or from some cheap internet vendor. The card is going to be a big chunk of the the problem. Most of the no-name cards you see on E-bay are knock-offs or pirated. CCTV gear is like any other gear. If there is a huge price differances between two things then there is probley a reason.
(Previous PeopleVision Project)
Check out the incredible demos under the heading "Research Areas" (bottom of page) at http://www.research.ibm.com/peoplevision/
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
I recall that many songs that had quite realistic recordings of gun shots in them!
NWA's "gangsta gangsta" isn't the best example, but it's the first I could think of.
Blar.
http://www.research.ibm.com/peoplevision/
Commercial Availability: The S3-R1 system is currently available to end customers on a pilot basis. Business partners can also license the technology for product development.
Check out the demos under "Research Areas" (bottom of page)--incredible!
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
You realize that it's massive overkill for a four camera system or really any camera system under 64 cameras?
I live in Baltimore. Graffiti is the LEAST of our city's problems and littering is our town pasttime.
Once the weather warms up here, residents in neighborhoods were the cameras are installed will have to listen to the machine saying "don't litter" all summer long because bored kids are going to find the camera's line of sight and throw trash right into it. Or *act* like they're tagging so they can hear "don't graf!". Come August, these will be the new Wii and PS3 for kids who live in zip codes that start with 212.
The citywatch cameras used to catch drug dealers have been very effective at moving drug dealers off busy thru streets and into dark alleys where the cameras can't see. They also have big blue flashing lights on top, some of them shining right into people's windows. The big blue lights now equate to "ghetto" for most Baltimoreans and they're hurting the city's own gentrefication efforts.
They're installing these cameras because they'll pay for themselves and then some. Hitting people with small fines for littering just racks up cash for the city. Funny, because they had a budget surplus last year (and yet our schools still suck). Constantly fining people only erodes the police department's relationship with the public in a city that already has a bad witness intimidation problem.
But we'll have less trash in the street!
That's is very sad... The misunderstand of song lyrics is the minor part. It's that the lyric in question is an obvious reference to DUNE, and anyone who ever saw the movie should know it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well, I for one welcome cameras that can spot people taking a dump on the streets. Filthy, Filthy bastards!
yes, grandparent poster can look it up, a .45 or 9mm is 155+ db, a 357 magnum 160+ db, even the lowly .38 special 153. No car stereo or boom box ever made sounds like that, you'd go painfully deaf if that level of sound lasted even a second.
I find the 9mm higher pitched but not quieter than .45 ACP. Even lowly .38 special out of my snub nosed Ruger SP101 has a roar under the high pitched crack that no one is ever going to mistake for a firecracker.
Unfortunate term, n'est pas?
Wikileaks, no DNS
David Brin's book The Transparent Society (part of which is available on his site) argues that universal surveillance is inevitable, and that the question is, who will have access to the data? Will the cameras all be aimed at us private citizens and watched by faceless Thought Police agents (or AIs, for the modern version), or will we too be able to tune in and know who is watching us and why? So far the answer seems to be the first one.
Revive the Constitution.
My EE teacher had such problem. One day he laid a bare wire along the wall, and through a current limiting capacitor he fed it with pulsed high voltage. The next day a few drunks from the village walked funny and since then nobody pissed at his house.
Some problems have simple technical solutions.
When I was younger, we had those things, I think they were called books. They actually required some effort to read, though; also, having an imagination of one's own usually enhanced the storytelling instead of colliding with it like in case of moving pictures. Geez, am I *that* old?
And the liquid discoloration from the lysol?
A similar line was in the book as well.
It's fascinating to see xenophobic trolling on
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Counting cards is not cheating! Using your mind and observing the cards played face up on the table is perfectly legal.
The casinos just hate winners with a repeatable statistical advantage. Then they take your picture for their 'facebook' and permanently ban you from any of their gaming houses. Bastards!
Oh, and the best one was the one to "stop smoking" - all it ever saw was a cloud of smoke from the group of kids standing directly below it smoking and blowing their smoke onto its lens. Classic. It didn't help that the first one we got was about one frame per second, so any "fights" it recorded consisted to two kids walking towards one another, the one walking away whilst the other was on the ground...
So if i manage to get a really good mask of an actual cop and pretend to paint a wall in front of a camera, the copper gets flagged "graffiti artist" and will be called on himself everytime he passes a camera?
You would be wrong on that. You should read the book "More guns, less crime". What you obviously have been told is what I call the "Mommy toy" reaction. That is, just take guns away as if it was a misused toy, as if that will work. It hasn't worked anywhere in the world. For instance, would you rob a bank if you thought some of the people are armed? Would you be quite so cocky if you thought the other guy is armed? No, a well armed society is a polite society. Hollywood really did the west a disservice that way. It was entertainment. I know I feel much safer out in Colorado where guys have guns on their belts than in Washington where they have proably the toughest gun laws in the country and the worst problem.
So maybe the answer is surveillance and when you find the criminal, shoot them like they do here - http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Kenya_s_overworked_p olice_gun_down__01222007.html . Easier than arresting them and it would give people an incentive to not commit crimes. I know, it is negative reinforcement but it works. Shouldn't be a problem since you have them on camera. Better yet, have it set so the camera can shoot them on site. Guy tries to rob someone and suddenly he is on the ground in pain from the camera gunshot. Hey, this sounds like a movie plot.
You're half-right, half-wrong.
It's true that it's often very hard or impossible to analyze and classify human action with a near-100% rate of success (though the work of people like Takeo Kanade is getting us closer everyday).
However, the example you give is bogus. Check frames before/after the action to determine significant colorspace change on the wall. And, if you want to deal with covering grafitti, do a comparison with images of the wall pre-defacing (or just with average wall color). It's not a trivial problem per se, but it's a lot more solved than you seem to indicate.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
Apropos to nothing
Certainly, no normal stereo is that loud. I also intentionally went to the extreme end of things. But, there's always somebody out there who is trying to go way beyond anything sensible (even if it's not so much an identifiable series of sounds).
I don't think that detracts from your point though. The above can hardly be used to contradict you in any meaningful way.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
yowzah, a car stereo that can reproduce jet engine noise at full volume. or a howitzer firing, for that matter.
Nah, more like a loud, ill-defined noise -- they're not really generating anything which would be called music, or a tune, it's just a big brrraaattt sound which they measure for intensity.
You use a large amount of power, for a very short discharge, and then after the smoke clears and you've probably damaged a few $k in parts, they decide who won.
A very odd competition indeed.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Watching, hearing, and interpreting what you are doing.
A man chooses, a slave obeys - Andrew Ryan.