Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Computers are already smart enough to talk to us. They just don't have anything interesting to say.
Why don't you try starting a conversation?
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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.
Abnormal activity? You mean like a slashdotter outside, in the sun, with a date?
Table-ized A.I.
Computers are already smart enough to talk to us.
Do computers worry you ?
They just don't have anything interesting to say.
I'm not sure I understand you fully.
Why don't you try starting a conversation?
Do you believe I don't try starting a conversation ?
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...
...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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