Video Surveillance Tech Detects Abnormal Activity

Repton writes with news of a company, Behavioral Recognition Systems, that has received 16 patents on a new video surveillance application that can convert video images into machine-readable language, and then analyze them for anomalies that suggest suspicious behavior in the camera's field of view. The software can 'recognize' up to 300 objects and establish a baseline of activity. It should go on sale in September. "...the BRS Labs technology will likely create a fair number of false positives, [the CEO] concedes. 'We think a three-to-one ratio of alerts to actual events is what the market will accept,' he says. 'We could be wrong.'"

Comments

Cool

[clang_jangle]

Great! Now, all they have to do is combine that with this, and we can all sleep soundly.

There's an easy way to torpedo this...

[Channard]

... when it first gets deployed - if it gets deployed - spread the word across the internet and get people to regularly silly walk past it and do other wierd but non threatening stuff. Hey presto, so many false positives it's rendered useless.

There's an easy way to deal with you...

[frovingslosh]

And you don't think that will soon be made illegal? You sure sound like a terrorist to me, to Gitmo with you!

Re:Doesn't need to be all that accurate

[shawb]

The ratio of false positives really shouldn't be that much of an issue if the system is implemented properly.

A bigger issue with a system like this would be false negatives. Economics being what it is, this means that the organizations deploying these cameras would likely end up hiring less people to watch the monitors per camera (whether that means an increase in cameras or a decrease in staff.) Therefore, the people watching the monitors would end up relying on the system to look for suspicious behavior. Then false negatives start to come into play. "suspicious behavior" that a human would notice and investigate may be missed by the system, and therefore go uninvestigated. This could cause escalating problems when people decide to learn what behaviors would trigger a "suspicious" flag and then go about doing their nefarious deeds where a human could have spotted them.

Sure, it would be possible to institute an automated suspicious behavior system to augment existing systems, but in reality it would end up taking away from resources used for security. Even if the system would not reduce security levels, a system such as this would at least reduce the future investment in other proven security methods, such as an increase of competent staff to watch the monitors.

A ratio of three-to-one false alarms?!

[misterhypno]

If that's what they're shooting for, then I have a name for the system:

Cry Wolf!

Because, that's all it's really going to do!

Heaven help any street performer that gets caught by this video frankenstein's monster, because the cops will, in some jurisdictions, come in blasting away and a mime is a terrible thing to waste!

Technically impossible

[Potatomasher]

I call shenanigans on this.

There is no way they can recognize 300 objects in real world conditions. I work in machine learning (academics) and the current record for generic object recognition sits at around 54-57% for the Caltech 101 database (contains images of 101 different objects). So basically the algorithms of the best and brightest minds in academia (LeCun, Poggio, Lowe, etc) get it wrong half the time !!

If any government officials are listening... Please don't waste our tax money on this !