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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.'"
Great! Now, all they have to do is combine that with this, and we can all sleep soundly.
Caveat Utilitor
If I walk past a security camera in a full sized squirrel outfit, humans couldn't even figure that one out let alone a computer. These systems are just dumb. Wait until computers are smart enough to talk with us to develop something like this otherwise it'll never be remotely accurate.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
As long as the cops don't beat too many people too extremely for false positive behavior I can't see where this could be a problem. And Homeland Security is already working on getting some Executive Orders written up that will make it a crime to act in ways that cause false positives, so there should be no false positives in the near future (by definition they will be real positives). Problem solved.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
While it's a worry how 1984 society is becoming, I don't think false positives are a particularly bad issue with this technology. An operator who would normally be supposed to watch multiple streams of video for anomalous activity can use these more like bookmarks for subsequent human verification. The bigger issue as I see it is that 16 new patents were just granted on software/algorithms.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
... 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.
And you don't think that will soon be made illegal? You sure sound like a terrorist to me, to Gitmo with you!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
1. File a bunch of mumbo jumbo patents on video surveillance
2. Convince some trade rag to interview your CEO
3. Submit the story to /. as a clear and present danger to "Your Rights Online"
4. ?
5. Go public!
I swear you must be a troll from Homeland Security...
That's like saying "Oh sure, it is worrisome that I have a live hand grenade with the pin pulled jammed in my mouth, but I don't think it would be extremely bad if it just blew off one of my pinky toes"
This kind of technology makes me want riot...ahem...i mean...to exercise my 1st amendment right to protest in a law abiding way.
I'm sickened. The CEO says: "We think a three-to-one ratio of alerts to actual events is what the market will accept."
Thank you Dave Raggett
I'm sure everyone on Slashdot is donning their tinfoil hats and screaming big brother (I've already seen a couple posts to that effect) but that really isn't the target market. You'll find that by far the most customers of CCTV equipment are private companies. Pretty much any large store will have an extensive CCTV system to watch for shoplifting.
Ok well the problem is that you have to have humans watching it for suspicious activity. It is completely infeasible to hire one human per camera, and the more cameras a given human has to watch, the less they catch. Well, something like this could help. If it sees something suspicious, it brings it up on a display to one of the security personnel. The person then decides if it is a problem, or a false alarm.
A moderate amount of false alarms is fine. This wouldn't be a case of "The system went off, arrest him!" It'd be a case of "The system went off, let's have a human watch and see what's going on." It would allow for better use of security personnel.
Heck, I'd be interested in a system like this at work. We have CCTV on our computer labs. However we don't have anyone monitoring it. It's more for liability reasons, and so that if someone steals or damages a computer, we can hopefully help the police catch them. However prevention is better than clean up. So it'd be cool if when the system thought something was wrong, it'd notify staff and we could look. If everything was fine, we carry on as normal. If something is indeed happening, we call the police.
You've got to stop with the idea that these sort of things are designed to figure out what you are thinking for some evil government plan. They aren't. They are designed to help make security systems more effective.
As noted in TFA and if the false positive ratio can be reduced to even 10-to-1, this technology might rapidly become the best friend of the fellow who has to constantly scan 100 surveillance screens for unusual activity.
But this system's definition of "unusual activity" intrigues me. If one of these toys is set up for example in a bank to monitor a vault door and a bank guard passes by the door every hour on his rounds, the software would presumably record that as "normal" activity. What is the "unusual" element that would prod the AI into sending an alert if a thief did exactly the same thing? What dynamic does the system employ to determine if a bank guard is a legitimate bank guard or Willie Sutton? The time it happened? Facial recognition? The fact that the "bank guard" pulled a cutting torch or dynamite out of his backpack and started going to town on the vault door?
Could the system be configured to send an alert when an expected activity didn't occur such as a bank guard or jailer missing one of his rounds?
Its difficult to imagine this system being used in any sort of serious anti-shoplifting capability in a retail setting. Would the AI be able to tell the difference between a customer picking up an iPod to look at the fine print on the box and a shoplifter shoving the iPod under his shirt? Would the system alert on me if I innocently tucked in my shirttail while walking down an aisle? As always, the devil is in the details.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Abnormal activity? You mean like a slashdotter outside, in the sun, with a date?
Table-ized A.I.
Machine: Uh oh, Jeremy stoped sticking his finger into his nose. I better call this one in!
...
Operator: Ummm... Why has it shown me Jeremy just sitting there?
Machine: Nope, there he goes again, digging away at his nose, everything back to normal. Better stop transmitting.
Machine: Whoa, he stopping barking for boogers again! Better show the boss!!
Operator: Why does this dumbass machine keep showing me Jeremy just sitting there for goodness sake...
Machine: Boss! Boss! Come on, look! DIFFERENT! ABNORMAL!
Operator: *Hmmm what's for lunch...*
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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!
Jebus, what imaginations you people have. Who the hell is talking about arresting the false positives? There's a HUMAN IN THE LOOP. Someone is watching the alerts, which means innocent behavior gets discarded before the police show up. Fucking relax.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I'd guess the cameras would most likely be programmed to identify the subject(s) as mentally disturbed, but most likely harmless.
UK citizens are safe in the knowledge that they're being watched.
That poster is no one-off either. After it became fashionable to compare everything to 1984 the Government agencies realised they could play on people's paranoia. Hence the 'watchful eyes' poster, the targeting benefit fraud campaign and the warning to car tax evaders ("You can't escape the DVLA computer").
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
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 !
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
To the fool who tagged this 'unusualisnotabnormal':
You're wrong. Unusual and abnormal mean essentially the same thing - something out of the ordinary, something not routine.
If the point you were trying to make is that authorities shouldn't be suspicious of every unusual occurrence, then perhaps something like 'unusualisnotwrong' would have better served your purpose.
From TFA: $1,500 to $4,500 per camera.
100 screens, assume each one rotates thru, um, 5 cameras, that's 500 cameras, say $3000 per, 1.5 million bucks. You could actually HIRE HUMANS, say 20 of'em, at $75K each to watch 5 screens each, and have a 1:1 ratio of accuracy.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
> You could actually HIRE HUMANS, say 20 of'em, at $75K each to watch 5 screens each, and
> have a 1:1 ratio of accuracy.
Never pulled guard duty, did you? you won't get a "1:1 ratio of accuracy" even if you hire someone for each individual camera.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...wide area surveillance system (which included video analytics for loitering, wrong way traffic in a crowd, crowd panic analysis, smoke/fire detection by video, et cetera) I can point out that there are MANY companies, corporate research groups, and universities that have been doing things like this for several years (in some cases almost 10 years.)
This company is in for a rude awakening when they realize that (a)their price per camera is extraordinarily high (this one metric is the biggest decider in large installation proposals [along with whether or not you have to mount the cameras on poles or just hallways/buildings]) and (b)a false alert rate of 3 to 1 is TOTALLY unacceptable. The entire purpose of video analytics in a security environment is to reduce the workload on the monitoring staff (and hopefully put more of them out into the field) while being able to scale up your coverage. I assure you that a 3 to 1 false alert rate will result in zero customers in a year. Measuring the false alert rate is also highly subjective. Companies tend to use a given scenario repeatedly to measure their results when, of course, this has little to no bearing on reality. Things like the weather (moving shadows affect certain algorithms even when accounted for algorithmically, headlights, flashlights, camera flashes change things, wind, rain, snow, bugs, everything you can imagine, lol...) negate all of these measurements.
It is nice to see new blood in this space, but I hope they were smart enough to make their software offerings totally distinct from their hardware (many companies do not) so that they can integrate with other systems without to much work. That's the best way to make money in the video analytics market right now. The big boys (like SIEMENS) got into the game about 3 years ago and they'll squeeze you out every time unless you can offer something that helps them land a big deal.
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Yes, this is why any such technology must be viewed with some concern. In parallel with requiring people to change their behaviour for the benefit of the machine, we also have the danger of trusting the machine. Sooner or later, some jobsworth will decide that a beep on the machine constitutes "reasonable grounds" for suspicion, which is all that is required to stop/search or arrest someone in some places. Ironically, a 1-in-4 failure rate is probably a good thing here, since at least then such a decision is likely to be overruled by a higher authority sooner rather than later. But what is ever an acceptable failure rate, given the negative consequences for the innocent victim of the system?
You need a pretty severe penalty/compensation/appeals system to overcome the downward spiral once you start to trust the machine, perhaps something along the lines of exponentially increasing compensation payments with each false accusation of the same person and personal responsibility on the part of the operators so they could go to court and be subject to sanctions if they abuse their position. But of course, this sort of thing doesn't really happen. What really happens is that the Powers That Be, whether government or corporate interests, pretend it's OK for a minority of cases to be wrong, and most of the little people don't have the resources to fight the abuse.
Meanwhile, the person on the other end gets to be like the lady in the UK who was on a TV report recently because her car number plate was cloned: she is receiving automated fines for motoring offences at a silly rate from various government agencies, each of those fines has to be challenged individually in court, and there is no mechanism available to flag as suspect the record in the DVLA database those agencies used to find her. Her life has become an ongoing, government-sanctioned harassment campaign, and while there ought to be one hell of a due process lawsuit in the works since this is the government doing the dirty work, at the time they showed the report no lawyer had been able to advise her on how to stop the madness.
Regardless of the theory, for every mass surveillance technology we allow to be introduced, stories like that one are easy to find. And most mass surveillance technologies don't really work very well anyway: city centre CCTV hasn't been proved to reduce crime, ANPR cameras result in the real criminals investing in false number plates, etc. We would do well to remember the old saying that man should not be judged by machine, and to oppose any sort of machine-based summary "justice", lest we slide further into the hole we are digging for ourselves.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.