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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."
Nothing can go wrong!
A little more info from the BRS Labs website:
...
but still send an alarm when a
burgler steals your stuff!
"The system takes the input from existing video security cameras (no need to change equipment); recognizes and identifies the objects in each frame and passes that data to its Machine Learning Engine. There, the system 'learns' what activity is normal for each unique area viewed by each camera. It then stores these LEARNED memories, much the same way the human brain does, and refers back to them with any and all future activities observed by the camera. If any behavior falls outside of the norm, alerts are generated."
Sounds impressive, but will the algorithms be sophisticated enough to watch grass grow and realize that it's normal behavior for the garbage truck to come by weekly
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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.
...that somewhere else in the world, there is a young, badass mother fighting off robots from the future that were designed to look like my Governor in a heroic attempt to destroy this new technology along with her scrappy, but as-of-yet slightly immature son....
At least, I think that's where we are in the time-line right?
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What a great way to absolve any personal responsibility. Detained wrongfully? Not our fault, the machine said you were moving like a terrorist.
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.
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.