Movement Sensors a Less Invasive Alternative To CCTV

holy_calamity writes "Researchers at Mitsubishi say cramming buildings with movement sensors, not cameras, is a safer and less invasive alternative to CCTV. They covered their office building with 215 low-cost sensors to watch over their colleagues and show how it works. A video shows how a user can see people's movements on a map of the building in real time. Data from the sensors is much easier to handle than video footage, and it can easily be searched." The Surface-like UI is pretty neat too.

Comments

Better link:

[choas]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VvDxDGiFa8Q

Re:Effectiveness

[esocid]

RTFA: They will mainly use motion sensors and place cameras in strategic locations so they can go back and track a particular person if they need to. It doesn't seem like a good implementation for a method of time-sensitive tracking to me, plus in a crowd situation it's pretty useless. I may be wrong but it sounded like it was more a way of studying movement behaviors rather than pure individual tracking.

Re:50/50

[mfh]

The fact that you have a UID of 56 and still don't have excellent karma says something about the quality of your opinions. Your intarweb is broken... my karma is Excellent.

Re:Energy saving

[flyingfsck]

Electricity use for lighting in North America is only about 1% of the total. Most electricity is used by heavy industry, steel mills, aluminium smelters and the like. So even if all tungsten bulbs are replaced with twirly-whirlies, it will make practically no difference. In a large office building, most lights are fluorescent already and the cost of adding more light switches outweighs any energy savings. Also, lights (even fluorescents) produce mostly heat and little light. In areas where buildings need to be heated most of the year, turning the lights off do nothing to the overall energy bill.

Even in my home, if I turn all the ligths off, I use less electricity made with hydro/nuclear/wind power and more natural gas in the furnace, so overall turning the lights off generates more smoke than leaving them on.

Each year, during the daylight savings changes, the energy companies declare that they noticed no difference whatsoever in electricity use - that should be a clue.

Re:Use your head, don't just parrot the article

[jdigriz]

The obvious question is why not both? The problem with CCTV is that it's space-inefficient. It records a whole lotta nothing. By pairing a cctv with a motion sensor, it can turn on the recording just when something interesting is happening. Or if they still want to record the whole time, the motion sensors can be used to tag interesting time codes on the tape, so you know where to fast-forward to without having to watch the whole damned thing. Heck, I can do this with my iSight and Evocam http://www.evological.com/evocam.html