Video Surveillance System That Reasons Like a Human

An anonymous reader writes "BRS Labs has created a technology it calls Behavioral Analytics which uses cognitive reasoning, much like the human brain, to process visual data and to identify criminal and terroristic activities. Built on a framework of cognitive learning engines and computer vision, AISight, provides an automated and scalable surveillance solution that analyzes behavioral patterns, activities and scene content without the need for human training, setup, or programming."

Comments

A Series of Already-solved Problems?

[littlewink]

To do what AISight does one needs:

• video software that can track 3-dimensional objects using a 2-dimensional video image. This is a known solved problem.
• A second layer of software (that uses the first as input) that distinguishes static and moving objects. Static objects form a "background" which can largely be ignored except for collisions with moving objects and except for specific human-input exceptions.
• A rule database. The initial rule database must have many rules about default object behavior and interactions.
• A learning system that detects heretofore unseen interactions, alerts a human user and asks for a new rule or validation of the anomaly as something that should cause an alert.

Moving objects must be dynamically tracked and their behavior somehow segmented into steps. This is arbitrary in that there can be a theoretically infinite variety of such segments for any given macro behavior. E.g., I can say "Mary handed the book to Tom." or I can say "Mary grasped the book, Mary extended her arm in the direction of Tom, Tom extended his hand in the direction of Mary and grasped the book, Mary un-grasped the book, Tom retracted his arm (with the book)." Both describe the same action, but the second has a finer segmentation of behavior.

All the pieces are available in freeware. It's essentially a classic AI expert system. Since they're getting millions for known technology (and software), I expect to see a freeware version of this available soon!8-))

Re:Sick and tired

[WillRobinson]

I agree in business its ok, but really every intersection in Texas has 4 cameras now. Even ones in small towns, paid for by grants from DHS.

In the Dallas Metroplex, they have also installed networking which is supposed to be used by emergency workers (this makes me laugh as when there is a real disaster they will not have power) but I am sure they are also being used by the cities to read the power and water meters in the future.

Taking even a small failure rate, the cost of maintenance will be beyond what the cities can stand to keep the systems up. The big brother ideal will fail and only leave us with a bill to pay.