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."

Comments

Gunshots

[Threni]

> 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!

Re:Gunshots

[morgan_greywolf]

Have you ever actually heard a gunshot? As in live, in person? I have. Gunshots are very loud. Much louder than a mobile phone speaker. Mobile phones simply do not have the dB range to mimick a gunshot accurately.

Re:Gunshots

[biocute]

Maybe if a mobile phone is able to simulate a realistic gunshot noise, and its owner is keen to play that in the public, police should be alerted anyway.

Re:Gunshots

[celardore]

You may be aware that the UK is ahead of everyone else in terms of CCTV surveillance. This doesn't mean that the UK has a lower crime rate though, nor does it mean that they are on top of terrorism or gun crime. There has been a lot of publicity in the UK recently about gun crime, with a famous picture in the papers of Tory leader David Cameron with a youth behind him making some kind of gang sign related to guns.

Surveillance is not the answer, it doesn't make a difference if there are too many criminals to monitor. Gun laws (as Americans will say, right to bear arms etc) are not the answer. This has lead me to believe that there is no answer. We have to be politically correct remember. Don't discriminate against trolls, they're people too.

Re:Gunshots

[GiovanniZero]

Depends on the gun, 22s and even 45s aren't that loud. Especially if theres lots of white noise around it (ie cars etc). If someone were trying to protest urban surveillance it would interesting to see people spoofing gunshots or random other flags.

You're probably right that a cellphone wouldn't be able to do it but building a decent facsimile thats easy to hide wouldn't be hard. You'd probably get arrested though for defrauding police. You'd have to be more innovative, maybe incorporate your sounds into a song then play it over a boom box and say that you were just listening to music.

Re:Gunshots

[inviolet]

Maybe the government shouldn't be finding new and exciting ways to do less work and employing less real people? IMHO, as soon as they start tracking us with these cameras we should start making loud gun shot noises as we shoot the lenses out.

I'd rather be watched by algorithms than by humans. Humans are woefully fallible and (worse) in denial about their own fallibility. Humans are tribalistic asshats who lose objectivity if you are different than they are -- or if you aren't different.

Of course the advantage of human surveillance is that humans are so expensive that we won't pay for enough of them to watch everyone. That fact affords me the room I need to break laws in moral ways. We'd never program the surveillance computers to grant the same leeway.

Of course that would have the further advantage of eventually getting all those stupid laws undone. The only cure for a bad law is to enforce it on everyone, as only a surveillance society could do.

Re:Gunshots

[couchslug]

"Real people" are often dumber than the proverbial box of hammers.
I'd rather have cameras watching me any day so I can potentially use the footage (possibly along with other footage) to prove my innocence should any questions arise.
Ubiquitous private and public cameras mean the death of privacy, so I want as level a playing field as possible.

I live in a quaint little rural town. Given the choice between Bubbas eyewitness testimony or video footage, I'd feel much more comfortable going to court with pictures of truth.

Re:Gunshots

[Mister Whirly]

I doubt you have ever shot a .45 before, or been near one when one is fired. The .22 I'll give you - not that loud, could easily be mistaken for a backfire or fireworks. I can guarantee you a .45 would not be mistaken for a car backfiring - even with ear protection it still is quite a bang. Without earplugs, even being on the range when .45s are being fired will cause you to cover your ears instinctively. I have shot thousands of rounds from 4 or so different models of .45s, and not a single one of them could even laughingly be called "semi-quiet". 9mms are not as loud either, but usually they are so rapid in succession that you know it isn't anything but gunfire. See, living in the city CAN teach you things!

It would be very hard to realisticly duplicate the decibel level of actual gunfire on a boombox. The sounds you could get, but not the volume. And IANAL, but as far as I can tell, playing sounds of gunfire isn't illegal (unless done with intent to commit some other crime perhaps), but discharging a firearm is. If playing gunfire sounds was illegal, gangster rap would have been over shortly after it started in the 80s.

resistance is futile

[ArsonSmith]

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?

Re:resistance is futile

[Travelsonic]

I know all the scifi authors' opinions....

Surely that is sarcasm?

While we have an obligation to allow flourishing technology we also, IMO have a great obligation to make sure the technology is protected from tyrrany as well.

Re:resistance is futile

[Anonymous Coward]

The scifi authors got it wrong. First of all, the term 'big brother' is a blatant sexism terminology that should be banned, since surveillence is independent of gender. Secondly, unlike the 1984, the technology is so cheap these days, it is accessible by almost everyone. If you think all these 'authorities' are trying to get you, grab a digital camera and SPY THEM BACK AND POST THEM IN THYTUBE! I am so sick and tired of people who whine about how the Orwellian fantasy are becoming true when those are the same people carrying technologies to combat against such scenarios.

Re:resistance is futile

[ArsonSmith]

I know I asked the question but I'd like to post my, umm, hopes for how this will turn out.

1. Standards of Law will have to change. As it is now, if people were recorded 24x7, and held accountable for everything done, everyone would be in jail and or have racked up millions of dollars in fines. So what would this do? It would have to make laws that are much more relaxed, lenient and reflect actual intent of evil or harm.

2. punishment would have to be adjusted to actually reflect the crime. Would this also be able to change things like drinking and driving laws? Right now they are so out of control, if you have been drinking and the cops go to pull you over you have about equal consequence if you are to pull over and cooperate as you do if you flee from the police, and are picked up much later after the alcohol has left your system, but if your recorded history shows that you don't drive any worse after having a beer at the pub, but after 3 your driving habits change would this make the legal limits individualized and appropriate rather than blacked and abusive as they are now?

3. In a fully monitored society, what would be the justification for things like anti-gun laws? If Big Brother always knew what you were doing and could see that you grabbed your rifle and are now climbing the clock tower and stop you before you could do anything, how could they say that you can't own any gun you want? If I enjoy taking a fully automatic machine gun to the range and blasting off some rounds, big brother nows I like doing this and watches me ever time and tracks to see if I deviate in an attempt to go shoot up a school and stop me before that could happen. Fully monitored societies could actually be more free.

ObjectVideo

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

PLEASE someone, hook these to a traffic light.

[Mr.Scamp]

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.

"switch view to camera with movement" feature?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

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.

Doubt it.

[Kadin2048]

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?

Re:Doubt it.

[GFree]

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.

I'm reminded of a saying about how sound engineers describe the methods used for obtaining good gun sounds:

If you want a pistol shot, use a rifle.
If you want a rifle shot, use a shotgun.
If you want a shotgun blast, use a Howitzer.

Re:Doubt it.

[feepness]

If you want a pistol shot, use a rifle. If you want a rifle shot, use a shotgun. If you want a shotgun blast, use a Howitzer.

Crap, I need a Howitzer recording... anyone got a spare atomic weapon?

Re:The Wii is amatuer to what a camera system can

[Tarlus]

"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..."

Well, there's kind of a line between the sleek elegance of the Wiimote, and just flat-out looking like an idiot. :P

oh goodie

[band-aid-brand]

This has made firecrackers much MUCH more entertaining. *runs off to buy stock in black cat fireworks co.*

If only..

[hack slash]

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.