Slashdot Mirror
Shadow Analysis Could Spot Terrorists
Hugh Pickens writes "An engineer at Jet Propulsion Labs says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk — a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person's walking style is very hard to disguise. Adrian Stoica has written software that recognizes human movement in aerial and satellite video footage by isolating moving shadows and using data on the time of day and the camera angle to correct shadows that are elongated or foreshortened. In tests on footage shot from the sixth floor of a building, Stoica says his software was indeed able to extract useful gait data. Extending the idea to satellites could prove trickier, though. Space imaging expert Bhupendra Jasani at King's College London says geostationary satellites simply don't have the resolution to provide useful detail. 'I find it hard to believe they could apply this technique from space,' says Jasani." Comments on the article speculate on the maximum resolution possible from KH-11 and KH-12 spy satellites.
Go ahead, develop more technology, there's always around it.
Is "useful data" a euphemism for "give us more money"?
Who puts a spysat in geostationary orbit? It's way too high, you'd need a telescope that dwarfs Hubble to get a decent view. You put spysats in the lowest orbit you can get away with, and you make sure that you have enough of them that any target of interest will be covered frequently enough for your purposes.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
An engineer at Jet Propulsion Labs says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk -- a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person's walking style is very hard to disguise.
I knew it! The Ministry of Silly Walks is really just a subdivision of MI6!
Defeated by a simple 2 inch lift in one shoe.
Obviously, but this isn't exactly rocket science.
The global-warming deniers are going to use it to track Al Gore from orbit, since he now casts a shadow that can be detected from space.
Just point at the screen and say "Enhance this part!" There you go. If there's something in the way, like a rock, tree, or the roof of a building, just say "Enhance it again" and you'll get all the resolution you need.
If that isn't good enough for you then maybe you could create a GUI interface using Visual Basic to do the job for you.
Would TV lie to me about this kind of thing?
at the Academy of Silly Walks
Oh yes... I'm buying stock in Tinfoil!
20th century Marxism is not progress...
how does this affect my rights online?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Will old people at the bus stop be killed by predator drones because their walk is 95% similar to OBL's?
terrorists take the bus.
My own was using lamberts cosine law to gather angular information on leg position by the light patterns reflected off the thigh of someone walking directly towards the camera.
The problem with gait recognition is, AFIAK, it's not really been proven to be a decent biometric - i.e. I'm not sure it's really all that unique, not without measuring things at a very high resolution, which probably isn't going to be possible either from space or with the current install-base of cctv cams.
Anyway, scary stuff if it does work.
Who needs a satellite? That technology could be interesting for any kind of reconnaissance aircraft, especially UAVs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle) that delivers high resolution pictures but should have the same problems (looking straight down from rather high altitudes) identifying someone in a crowd. And as you need video footage (MOVEMENT), i am not sure how many spy sats can provide that, never mind the resolution...
I guess the Ministry of Silly Walks will be accused of aiding and abetting terrorists...
"Sorry our Predator drone blew up an entire family and 25 bystanders -- somebody in the crowd was walking like a terrorist we once saw."
I piss off bigots.
If Keyser SÃze could pull off the fake, then I'm sure bin Laden could as well.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
So if it looks like a terrorist, talks like a terrorist, and now walks like a terrorist, it is a terrorist? We should find a way to see how they taste and smell..
Aromatic crispy peking terrorist?
"'I find it hard to believe they could apply this technique from space..."
Well, you're welcome to find it hard to believe but, given what "they" are capable of seeing from space, seeing a shadow isn't terribly hard to imagine. And, if not now, guess what - technology has this tendency to improve as the years go by. If the technology isn't there today, it won't take long for it to get there. So, you might want to pull your head out of your butt and start believing. I'm just sayin'.
If my gait says anything, it's "I'm going to snap and kill everyone I run across until I'm stopped." Guys in black helicopters are going to abduct me and send me to Gitmo or one of the secret prisons in Afghanistan just because I'm really pissed off at everyone/thing. Thoughts are not a crime (or at least they shouldn't be).
I guess I'll start wearing a kilt or really baggy pants to mess with the algorithm, or I could rollerblade everywhere, which should just make it look like I'm a fast-moving drunk.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/nations-spies-w.html
Choose your walking animation carefully.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm a bit duck-footed, and about anybody can recognize who I am before they're close enough to see my face. I'd probably have trouble fooling a human; if I held up a liquor store or a bank, a mask wouldn't help.
But a computer? Who do these people think they're fooling? Computers are brain-dead simple to fool about anything whatever.
As to resolution, well, this comes from my memory of a a newspaper article so take it with a grain of salt, but when Hubble was launched it was reported that if you put in in St Louis you could read the date on a dime in De Moines if it was focused properly. If they can aim Hubble up, they could aim another one down. Does anyboy have verification/rebuttal to this? I'm curious; as I said, I read it in the paper and they;re bad about getting science and technology wrong.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Read the first chapter or two of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother for some low-tech ideas on defeating gait analysis.
I like how yet again ``spotting terrorists'' is an euphemism for ``spotting everyone else, too''. I habitually substitute ``spotting YOU'' and honestly think of all the good it would do.
Yes, there's useful stuff in there, but again only if those watching you can be trusted. This has been said often enough before and still people score cheap headlines with the same fallacy.
Anybody spot the shadow of a flying pig yet?
When I'm tired (after running miles) or carring heavy bags I walk differently. Sometimes I even sometimes realise I'm not walking 'normally' when I'm going along the corridor at work. Either I am a perambulatory schizophrenic (and will end up in Gitmo for impersonating a terrorist) or this is all just nonsense.
Although I do know that my running style is pretty constant (I have running shoes fit for my gait), but I can walk with varying purpose and my gait matches that.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
So... um, you've got a "terrorist" under tight enough surveillance that you can build a "gait profile", but you're not arresting or just outright executing them?
Admittedly, I support this effort. Once complete, the DHS can take its rightful place as the Ministry of Funny Names and Walks.
c.
Log in or piss off.
...but how about from a Predator?
Or from your grocery store ceiling?
this has got to be the biggest load of bull$4!7 to ever come down the pike...
it is shocking believe the morons in government wastes billions in tax dollars on horsecrap like this...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I would say that this technology would only be good applied to in combination with somethnig else, but not by itself. I would never trust something this sketchy by itself, depending on the shadows and the sun and the moon and the stars....please...I see the addition of this to something like facial
or social netting, but not by itself.
If "they" have satellites that can provide enough resolution and real-time tracking to analyze shadows, couldn't they just, I don't know, look at peoples faces? I mean track the subject and wait for them to look up, then send in a predator drone to do more recon...
If I ever do something where I'm concerned about Big Brother watching me with their eyes in the sky, I'll just use one of the following:
Bike
Wheelchair
Skateboard
Electric wheelchair
Segway
the terrorists even more easily. They will be the ones with bad backs.
What would Jack Parsons think?
There are over 36 million lines of COBOL code in the world, and they are all raping children.
Now your identity?
Study says gait may be associated with orgasmic ability. Specifically they indicate something like an 80% success rate of identifying women who have vaginal orgasms based on their gait. There certainly seems to be something to the biomechanical structure of your body. I honestly wonder if its a unique fingerprint or if an entire family my be very similar.
Satellites not only do not have the resolution, but lack video capability. Low-flying electro-optical platforms (like Predator), however would be much more useful for this.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
We've just had the dullest August on record, and I don't mean we've still got Gordon Brown.
That's bad news for these people who no doubt are the worst terrorists ever! Nuke them from orbit!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It was 30 years ago, or so, that i saw pictures taken from an orbiting satellite that peered down to a golf course. The final enlarged image was that of the golf-ball. I shall never forget what it displayed: " Titleist " !! And i suspect, after 30 years and trillions of dollars, that the capabilities are improved, to put it mildly!!!!!!!
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
A small aircraft manned or unmanned can do the same thing more cheaply and from much lower altitude, which also gets around atmospheric distortions.
As for disguising gait, I guess you can fool all the spy cameras some of the time and some of the spy cameras all of the time, but ...
Still don't you get a comforting glow knowing how well we are being "looked after" (evil cackle).
... do the moonwalk! ;-D
... tell a woman's orgasmic history through gait analysis too. See here. Maybe they could come up with software to tell how promiscuous a woman is by her walk.. Ohh the possibilities!
This space for rent, inquire within.
Yes, but that still doesn't answer his objections.
Let's say you've got nothing to hide, are on the database, then you get an abcess in your foot. I had one, for example, thanks to some retarded shoes which did that much damage and it got infected. Next thing I knew, my walking style could belong in a "ministry of funny walks" sketch, except for me it was more painful than funny.
Would I suddenly be outside the database, and thus a suspect, in that scenario? Or what if they entered a criminal in the database when he had a similar injury, and then I have a similar injury two years later and suddenly I look like the re-appearance of Abdallah ibn Jihad, wanted for arson, genocide and jay-walking in East Bumfuckistan and Elbonia? (Made up name, btw. Means IIRC slave of Allah, son of jihad, or enough to get your average anti-terrrist spook get his panties in a knot by itself.)
It's not like you can choose when you'll have such an injury.
What is the degree of confidence in such an identification, anyway? How fine you can slice a gait and still leave room for normal daily variations? (E.g., account for stuff like today I'm feeling chippy and walk a lot livelier, while yesterday was a shitty day and my walk probably reflected that. E.g., today I walk on grass in the woods, yesterday I was walking on wet concrete, and a month ago I was walking on sand at the beach.) As they say, "if you're one in a million, there are 6000 exactly like you." Will it be able to positively identify said Abdallah ibn Jihad, even when he's walking uphill through the snow with a pebble in his boot, or will it be more like "it's one of 6000 people, one of which is Abdallah ibn Jihad"? Again, that's the number if it could positively and unerringly distinguish between one million different gaits.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But the real issue is that to stop terrorism we have know before hand the people that pose a real and credible threat. And I am not talking about the people with video cameras who are going to prove the police force is lying in statements or beating people up. I am talking about knowing that Timothy McVeigh is going to kill almost 200 people, including children. Or that Eric Rudolf was going to mount a extended reign of terror killing a innocent woman and a police officer. How does the gait analysis going to save the babies that the next religious extremist is going to kill?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So, put some pebbles in your shoes and you'll escape recognition. The world seems to be heading towards the one described in Corey Doctorow's Little Brother novel. - which is available under a creative commons license. Nicely formatted at feedbooks.com.
Walk Fremen style and you can stay incognito and avoid Shai-Hulud all at the same time.
It's weak against darkness! Use Mudo skills!
on new technology designed to determine whether we're all terrorists, i think back to the days when phrenology could determine whether we were all murderers.
to consider someone a terrorist based on their perceived actions is to, in a sense, insist upon the fact that all elements of emotion and kinematics are objective in human nature. discordians buck this trend, so do most sysadmins, libertarians, drug users, and anyone with a mental disorder.
without further adieu, an exploit for this system: before planning a terrorist attack, wear a shoe 1 size too large, or place something uncomfortable like a pebble in it. really, anything to alter your gait should take care of it.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Equipment required: 1 large umbrella
Just put a full-leg cast or brace on, and your gait will change without you even trying.
Scene at airport security:
"What are you hiding under that cast, sir? The metal detector can't find a knife or gun, but we think you are hiding a known terrorist's gait. Step aside and remove the cast and walk 50 paces."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
how researcher are scamming governments and get founds for their projects using the word "terrorism"...
So now we can identify terrorists based on their ability to have vaginal orgasms?
The original post implies we should alert both Disney, in order to protect Peter Pan, and The Shadow. As others have noted, if one has enough information to analyze the gait, shadow, etc. of an individual, even via satellite, then one most likely has the ability to arrest said individual. I am both amused and frightened that such a thing as 'shadow analysis' or 'gait analysis' is even remotely considered scientific. The scientific 'proof' that one's gait cannot be altered is 'thin' at best, as actors and con artists have been doing so for years.
"Doveryai, no proveryai." ('Trust, but verify.' - Russian Proverb)
"You can tell by the way I move and walk I'm a terrorist, no time to talk..."
Bullshit and strawmen, whether intentional or not. The objections to false positives have more to do with statistics, than with slippery slopes or anything else.
E.g., let's say I have a system which can look at photos from the security cameras, and tell you if a face or gait in the crowd matches a terrorist profile with 99% accuracy. (Which is actually a lot higher than what most of these snake oil systems get.) The problem in that case isn't that it lets 1% of the terrorists go. It's that it also creates 1% false positives out of people who aren't, for just one terrorist's photo. Apply that to just one airport, say the JFK, with its almost 60,000 passengers per day. If you get exactly one photo of each passenger, that's 600 false positives per day, in just one airport, for just one terrorist. But more likely you'll have everyone caught by several cameras during their trip to the airport, so the number multiplies accordingly.
Now feed it a database of several tens of thousands of known criminals, suspects, etc, and watch the number of false positives explode. Given that accuracy, just 100 photos are enough to match a majority of the passengers at one point or another.
At some point you can simply swamp the security with false positives, to the point where it's worse than useless.
And it's not just a hypothetical scenario, it's what airport security people themselves have said about previous trials with face recognition system. That they're crap and worse than useless. Would you accuse those too of being paranoid and slippery-slope types, or just accept that they probably know their job enough to know when a gizmo isn't helping it?
So basically spare me the bullshit about "nirvana fallacies" and "paranoid liberals". Learn what the real problem is, before talking out the arse about.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...
Am I the only one who thinks this article has absolutely nothing to do with gait analysis?
They're talking about recognizing the fact that a shadow belongs to a person based on the shadow's movement. Not about identifying a particular person based on his shadow's movement.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
The global-warming deniers are going to use it to track Al Gore from orbit, since he now casts a shadow that can be detected from space.
That would never work, Al Gore doesn't go anywhere that he can't use an internal combustion engine to get to.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Unless "terrorists" all walk a certain way, the article title is right out of the surveillance society's playbook.
Even spotting individual, known terrorists requires existing footage of them walking, presumably in the same shoes.
Besides, you know this system will quickly (d)evolve to have a "Show Only Jessica Rabbit-esque Hip Sway" button slaved to the nearest CCTV cam.
Wouldn't a long overcoat totally change my shadow? Isn't that what spies always wear anyway?
No sig today...
Indeed, terrorists are going to start training themselves to walk without rhythm :O
This gives 'High Noon' a whole new meaning. It is now the time that terrorists are most anonymous.
Think global, act loco
Female promiscuity does not extend to male IT geeks. Messalina herself wouldn't have been interested.
I piss off bigots.
i think it's better to try something and see how it works than to reject it because it might have the same problems as another system. If it fails, it fails. Pay some settlements and try something else.
What if we had several systems working together? Databases, IDs, face recognition, x-rays, gait analysis and so on working together? Could that cut down on the false positives? Systems that prevent the specific act (like reinforced doors) are fine, but i think it's worth the (some) effort to catch them on the ground.
What are the security people at the airports suggesting?
Who said anything about liberals?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I'm surprised that the NSA or CIA hasn't clamped down on this information before the world (including the terrorists who can can now work around it) has been informed. I think the US publishes WAY too much information.
OK, so it's a sort of new finger print, interesting. A few things though, why "terrorists"? Why not just every other wanted fugitive? Because that's what it's for, identifying fugitives, not telling who's a terrorist without knowing who we're looking for.
And then this : "Extending the idea to satellites could prove trickier, though. Space imaging expert Bhupendra Jasani at King's College London says geostationary satellites simply don't have the resolution to provide useful detail. "I find it hard to believe they could apply this technique from space," he says.". I don't know whether that expert's quote has been taken out of context by a clueless journalist (which is most likely the case), but that's such a retarded claim as a whole that it's not even funny. Of course geostationary satellites don't have the resolution, they're 22,000 MILES AWAY!! Which is why no one's retarded enough to use geostationary satellites for such tasks as spying, they all use low Earth orbit satellites which are like 100 times closer and hence have 100 times the resolution, making the best spy satellites able to read a newspaper's headline over your shoulder when you're outside (and if they can't then close enough).
So yes this identification technique may be used using the NRO's best spy satellites (which resolution remains a source of speculation). And since you would most likely use it in areas you can safely go to you can as well use an airplane.
You just got troll'd!
Put this in the same bin with the FBI's now discredited Lead Bullet analysis, and the idea that DNA matches are "1 in a Trillion", when you mass scan them.
Nothing to see here... move along.
--Mike--
I've worked on gait-analysis, along with facial recognition and other computer vision techniques. Gait-analysis is done by training an algorithm to identify a person's gait using a large amount of video as training data. You can't just snap a single picture of a terrorist and recognize their gate, or train an algorithm using 10 seconds of video that you have. You have to have sufficient training data if you want any meaningful recognition rate. As it is, gait-recognition has a much lower recognition rate than other vision techniques.
Making the training data useful for recognition is challenging enough. If you have footage of a person walking against a white wall at a controlled distance, it is easy to gather this data. However, if your training data is from a video of a person walking through city streets, much less a market place, there is an awful lot of human processing that needs to be done in order for the data to be useful for training. Also, as with facial recognition and other visual recognition techniques, gait-recognition is highly susceptible to changes in camera angle. If you train a gait-recognition algorithm on images of someone walking towards the camera, that doesn't mean that you can identify them with any reasonable success from the side or above. In essence, in order for this to work, you would need an ample amount of training data on a terrorist in a controlled environment. That probably isn't very likely. As you'll notice in from the article, these experiments were conducted in a specific controlled environment.
This story strikes me as someone doing some interesting research, but I'd be curious if we get any meaningful results from this work, even 10 years down the road.
This technology was recently circumvented by terrorist using several cans of Mountain Dew and no bathroom breaks.
"After a few cans of Dew and several hours without using the bathroom, the gait of the individuals changed suddenly to a very unstable, pinched position"
If you walk without rhythm, you won't attract the attention-of-the-DHS
Dan Wilson talked about gait analysis in "How to Survive a Robot Uprising". all it takes to foil this technology is a trench coat (or any other long form of dress that obscures your gait)
Stupid Story Titles.
Get over the TERRORIST HEADLINES crap.
Useless.... everyone knows they drive
Who are these people who come up with shit like this, what motivates them?
Adrian Stoica deserves to be shat upon as someone with no morals or principles who has sold out to the military industrial complex.
Obviously. The target is not to catch all terrorists. The target is to get everybody on the list. In 1948 somebody already wrote a book about it.
Once they have this, they will add other things. And the database will be searched only with OR and nothing with AND.
e.g. "your name" OR "your walk". The way the 'No Fly' lists works.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Wow, it's amazing how many posts are in here about how everyone could defeat the technology pretty easy.
/insert "New to /." joke here/, seriously, why does everyone always jump at such news so hastely?
Do you know the algorithms for doing this? Do you know the flaws and strengths of it? Have you seen the experimental data to infer some obvious weakness? It seems logical to think that some stones in a shoe will change the way you walk, but is the difference large enough to fool the program?
Aside from
Almost every new research being done is bashed away, even when few of the stories provide the actual paper to read (let alone someone understanding it).
Slashdot. Unreadable news to annoy nerds. - wonkey_monkey
A terrorist targets corrupt governments to force a change by making life unlive-able for the subjects of that government until THEY (not the terrorists) force a change.
Not that it matters to the person on the street who is killed or maimed for life.
Inside a country, to the folks living their under a corrupt government, its law enforcment they depend on the protect them from murder, rape, theft, etc.
No problem until the law enforcement becomes part of a corrupt CENTRAL gov't. Police in a democracy need to be kept LOCAL with access to resources that tie them all together.
A police state emerges as the central government tries to implement an over-reaching police department accountable to no one but that central gov't, and that is the state we are about to enter here in the US with ILLEGAL SPYING ON AMERICANS passed on July 9 by Pelosi and her 105 republi-Crats in the House leading the charge, Obama voted along with the republicans (except John McCain) and sealed the deal in the Senate so SPYING ON AMERICANS is now legal. Nice.
Reflection analysis has so far proven ineffective at identifying vampires.
Move all sig!
Well, IIACVS (a computer vision scientist), so here goes...
No, this won't spot terrorists. Currently biometrics are pretty good at answering the question "is this person Mr. A?" where A is know, and providing a yes/no answer.
They're OK at answering the question "Which of A,B,C,D is this person?", up to a fair number of people.
What they suck at is "I A any of the potentially 6 billion people who might go past this camera?"
The reason they're good at the first, is becaus eif you want to get entry based on biometrics, you don't generally hide your appearance. In the last case, hiding appearance s easy. Basically if you wear a large sack and sunglasses and gloves, your face, irises, fingerprints and gait are not accessible. No fancy camerawork will help with that and the system will not work.
Then there's more minor things like beards/lack of for faces, and for gait, a stone in the shoe, leg injury, John Cleese, an embarrassingly placed itch, and so on which also throw off the system.
Basically, Humans have had millions of years to perfect (and a large chunk of brain dedicated to the task of) identifying people we know. We're eally good at it, and can identify people we know very easily in a reasonable sized group.
We still don't scale well up to very lage groups, probably because the problem is too ill poosed to be tractable.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This analysis is not the problem people think it is, false positives or not. It's what they DO with the data that can be a problem. I would imagine that the sensible thing is that the "positive matches" get monitored further via other means, in order to further eliminate them from being a suspect.
ie: Guy gets flagged by the system, so ground cameras zoom in to get a better look and see if it's worth further investigation or not. Camera reveals nothing out of the ordinary? End of story.
I think my automatic ATM machine has one of those.
umbrella
It should read "Shadow Analysis Could Identify People." Spotting terrorists is just one application of that, assuming you have made a link between the people you're identifying and the behavior of terrorism. (Somehow I doubt that "shadow analysis" is able to actually identify terrorist behavior itself.)
Shadow Analysis Could Spot Terrorists
I was going to complain that this technique could spot everyone, but then I thought of the children and realized that this is necessary for their essential safety.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Now what your going to see is terrorist do random movements to confuse the detection of the sand worms... erm space satellites.
*Shuffle, step, step, walk, stop, step, run, skip.*
They'll then use thumpers, or lights+fan behind curtain to draw out the infamous satellite and harpoon it, so they can ride it to jihad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanide
Appearance and odor
Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is a colorless gas with a faint bitter almond-like odor. Most people can smell hydrogen cyanide; however, due to an apparent genetic trait, some individuals cannot.[2] Sodium cyanide and potassium cyanide are both white powders with a bitter almond-like odor in damp air, due to the presence of hydrogen cyanide formed by hydrolysis:
NaCN + H2O HCN + NaOH
KCN + H2O HCN + KOH
Now... If they could coat their body with something and THEN cover it with cyanide...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
When ever someone talks about a technology to stop "terrorism" you can be 100% sure it isn't about terrorists. It is about the control of the general public. Tracking citizens.
There is NOTHING detectable about a terrorist that makes them any different than any other person. If you can track a terrorist, you can track a political rival or ACLU member just as easily.
It's big enough to catch herpes though.
Obviously, they've never watched "The Usual Suspects". Really good terrorists like Keyser Soze have no problem changing their gait.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
If you see someone walking like they have rocks in their shoes or changing up their gait every couple minutes, beware, they are likely a terrorist.
to say it: They could start paying people to make un-serialized Segways, or they can take bikes and scooters. Yet, another major fucking DOD/et al BOONDOGGLE, fucking off taxpayer money. Security Theater strikes again. When the hell are these uniformed people going to think ASYMMETRICALLY? Jesus H Christ! Even a clunky old Mercedes can crawl or zoom across the desert. A little shielding to mask the occupants to some fuzzy degree, and whammo! If any predators are in the area, microwave them (if they can be visually spotted). Detect them at low altitude by setting up meshes of microwave towers. Track them by the grids they break, or the sound/visual reflections they make. This isn't rocket science, and it isn't new. Time to take these dollars and pump them or program them into domestic or foreign neighborhoods to promote an occupation in a JOB, generate contentedness, or docility or some such. Funding TOO MANY such programs is wasteful (don't tell me about jobs creation, homeland security, et cetera...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Cool pseudoscience bro.
We'll all just be reduced to wearing collars provided by the "Gamesters of Triskelion" (from the STTOS episode). Or, we'll be forced to enter a "Battle Royale" type of game. We'll be specifically selected based on our "threat potential" and suspicious activities.
Then, those gait-watching satellites and Predators will give the rulers of the world a whole new wargame. But, instead of dropping bombs or lasing the targets, they'll play the Bruce Dern number: "Black Sunday", and flechette the designated target/s of the hour.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075765/usercomments?filter=love
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
With homage to "The Usual Suspects," all the posters discussing ways to change their gait when committing a crime have it backwards. Start out from the first time your "identity" comes into existence with a limp, and after the crime is done, go back to walking normally. The gait marked with the criminal no longer exists.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I met a guy that worked in security for Vegas a couple of years back. Back then he described to me how the security systems could identify you by the way you walk. Apparently those guys in Vegas are bit ahead of things in terms of security...
Watching 6-7 billion people walk is out of the question for the satellites to cover. So, they specialize in spotting certain gaits before zeroing in and analyzing. Specifically, long, low strides, with one arm out in front, bent at the elbow, sashing a cape (possibly hiding a round, long-fused bomb). The other hand, if twirling a long moustache or rubbing the front brim of a black fedora, will tip off the satellite that it is, in fact, looking at a villain. The tracking of shifty eyes and maniacal cackling were removed for technological shortcomings... and the satellites kept targeting congress.
During testing, the engineers were proud to report the satellite alarmed them to several instances of women being tied to railroad tracks, banks being robbed, and suckers being stolen from infants. When a satellite makes a positive match to one of these terrorists, it will broadcast staccato piano music in a minor key to the area. Citizens are expected to boo and hiss these men if the satellites begin alerting them of their terrorist ways.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Capes and super-hero uniforms.
Dagnabbit.
Part of how Abby Hoffman evaded the FBI for years was by doing exactly that. Worked, too. He only got caught when he got back into politics.
Anyway, for most cases, there's a much easier hack. As plenty of people have pointed out, just put a pebble in your shoe and that multi-million dollar, high tech system will just pass you by. I suspect that taping one ankle or things like that would work in most cases, too.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Ha! I was sure to be right to wear a tinfoil hat! Now I just have to make sure it is wide-brimmed.
Your gait isn't so much like a fingerprint.
A little background. I am not familiar with this research specifically, but I have exposure to a very similar concept.
I used to do ground search and rescue in New Jersey. A big portion of what we did was woodland SAR for missing persons. Because of this, there was a lot of emphasis put on tracking.
There is a man named Tom Brown Jr. who is basically considered the modern foremost expert on the subject. He learned the basics from a young age from an old Apache scout who was his best friend's grandfather. It sounds incredible, but the man has written several books, both technical, and biographical. The technical ones aren't of much interest to folks who don't have an interest in tracking, but the biographical ones I would highly recommend. He currently runs a school in Toms River, NJ.
The organization I did SAR with put a lot of stock on Tom Brown's methods and incorporated them into their training schools. Eventually we opened up a dedicated tracker school, though I never participated in that level.
There is a technique known as pressure release tracking, where one looks at the characteristics of a track in a soft medium like sand, mud, or to a lesser extent, gravel or such. Within the track exists a whole environment that was created by the state of the organism that made it. Most people can figure out that if you shift your weight to your left, or favor your right foot, or are limping, that you'll see that in a track. But you can also see other things. Is the subject hurt? Is it hurt somewhere other than the legs? Is it tired? Is it male or female? Is it pregnant? How much does it weight? How tall is it? Is it carrying something? Does it have to urinate? Is it sexually aroused?
I know people who have reached the level where they can infer these things accurately. To me, it's not a stretch to believe that there are other ways that this could be done (this shadow technique for instance).
A good tracker can tell a lot by looking at your tracks, so I'd so I don't know how they plan to use gait data in a useful way, but I'm willing to entertain the idea.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
We here at the Ministry of Silly Walks are hard at work training our spies in how to avoid detection.
Our chief weapons are Fear, Torture, and a nice Samba.
Personally, I prefer a side-scrabble scuttle with a twirl at the end mind you.
Our enemies will NEVER figure this out and join German Expressionist Dance Troupes and Russian Ballet Dance Companies!
That would be ... unthinkable!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
is that I think we've now found your Indian name.
Greetings, Today I Walk on Grass in the Woods.
It really is a wonderful phrase, fwiw.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
All that's needed now is to outlaw all garments like kaftans and the likes. If that doesn't work, there's still hope: Bin Laden is large. Possibly the software can deduce "long shadow" >> "long person". Then again, gait analysis + terrorist probably attracts more funds than "software that can tell if a person is large from the length of the shadow".
People with non-standard body language will suffer constant harassment from the police, and as such people often have psychological/neurological issues they will find it harder to defend themselves from aggressive questioning techniques.
The idea behind this is to filter people by 'normality' and assume that abnormality is evidence of criminality. Its a disgusting notion to me.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
That may be so, but that's not what they propose.
I can very easily believe that a tracker _can_ infer things like "it's a man, favours his right foot, probably hurt his left leg, probably tired". That's sane.
And yes, probably by the shadow or gait too. Why not?
What I'm somewhat skeptical about is that they can say "ah, it's Abdallah ibn Jihad, we found him" with any degree of accuracy. You'd need a hideous degree of accuracy in those variables, to be able to sort 6 _billion_ degrees of favouring one's right foot. Basically that you could say, "hmm, he favours his right foot more than Moraelin, but less than Twitter, it can only be Abdallah. Call the CIA, we got him."
Or briefer:
Yet these guys propose to do exactly that: use it as a fingerprint. They want to look at someone's shadow from a sat image and say, "yep, that one is Abdallah ibn Jihad, we found him."
And that I doubt. It seems to me you just agreed there too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes, but that still doesn't answer his objections.
Let's say you've got nothing to hide, are on the database, then you get an abcess in your foot. I had one, for example, thanks to some retarded shoes which did that much damage and it got infected.
It wasn't a pair of Conquistadors, was it?
They run very tight.
Who is this Adrian Stoica and why has this person written such a program which so obviously has incredible potential for misuse by governments and the military? I'm making a mental note to blacklist the name. This person will never work for my company.
Shadow Analysis Could Spot Known Individuals With Some Degree Of Accuracy.
Fixed it for you.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
I can't dance
I can't talk
The only thing about me is the way I walk...
The same statistical argument applies to creating DNA databases and using them to hunt for perpetrators.
A DNA mismatch is essentially unambiguous. But a hit is a statistical issue, and hard to quantify because of unknown correlation of markers due to inheritance.
So using it to eliminate suspects is basic. And using it to point to one of a small number of unrelated suspects identified by other means is plausible. But throw the DNA pattern from a crime scene at a database containing thousands, or millions, of people (but not ALL of them) and you are just asking for false positives.
And as the tests get better and the false positive rate goes down it becomes even more dangerous, because it becomes more tempting to rely on it when only one "hit" shows up. (Consider, for example, identical twins separated at birth, where one is in the database, the other commits a crime, and the poor sap that gets fingered doesn't even know the twin exists.)
And someone brought in on a false positive has an extra handicap: DNA testing won't exonerate him (unless there's enough DNA evidence that more extensive tests can be performed and it happens to find an additional marker that mismatches.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Only the shadow shows.
I'm not going to troll like the other guy, but you're making an unjustified assumption: that airport security are going to act on every positive, whether a true or false one. All it is is information, and nothing more. At times it could be useful information. For instance, lets say an x-ray scan of someone's bag contains something suspicious, the information from this shadow analysis might add information to how to react to it. Or lets say that a known terrorist is arrested at an airport. Then you could use this program to narrow down who in the airport could be an accomplice.
Of course, if the airport security manager uses this kind of information in the wrong way, or acts on every positive without regard to the accuracy rating, then you're going to have problems, and this might be what those airport security personel are responding to. You obviously need to have more than one kind of survelience system in place, and the more survelience systems you have the stronger your overall security because you have more data to work with.
You make a good point that for a large airport a 99% accuracy rate still has too many false negatives. But if you have two different survelience systems with 99% then your overall accuracy rate is 100%-(100%-99%)(100%-99%). Okay, this assumes that both systems recieve the same data and well, I'd actually be interested in any corrections you guys can make to this calculation as it's just off the top of my head. But I hope you get the overall idea that accuracy increases the more systems you have.
Just think... If this had existed, terrorists like Nelson Mandela could have been captured years earlier, saving innocent White lives and the Rule of Law!
...right up until the suspect starts line dancing.
the word that means behavior in tamil (a south indian language) is nadaththai, which is derived from nada (walk).
Isn't it cheaper to just not piss off terrorists in the first place?