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

Of course

[sopssa]

Nothing can go wrong!

Re:Of course

[bugi]

The best of both worlds! Human stupidity plus the compassion of a machine.

I'll know it when I see it.

[Jason Pollock]

It's a press release pretending to be journalism.

If it doesn't need training, how does it define "terroristic activity"? Is it the "I'll know it when I see it" definition?

The article seems to indicate it works like a Bayesian filter on the video - pointing out things that aren't typical for the camera.

Much like any automated system that is supposed to filter out false positives, it is probably pretty easy to train either the operators or the system itself to throttle back the sensitivity to a point where it ignores everything.

Human Intelligence

[Reason58]

What a great way to absolve any personal responsibility. Detained wrongfully? Not our fault, the machine said you were moving like a terrorist.

False positve and False negative readings

[mjensen]

Much like detecting terrorists by facial recognition, this is vaporware until they publish some numbers.

I once had someone misplace a sales call to me, being proud his facial recognition system was 70% accurate. He had no idea how much his system is a pain in the ass when its wrong, and for the airport security business he was trying to get, 90% accuracy is considered terrible.

Re:Proof?

[Jurily]

Mod parent up. Said AI first needs to distinguish between "activity" and "the wind blew a leaf across the screen". Then you need to distinguish between "lights a cigarette" and "lights the fuse on dynamite".

So, if it already does all that, just one more question: how do you define "criminal and terrorist activities" programmatically when not even the law is clear? Even shooting people can be a non-criminal act.