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Fujitsu Tech Can Track Heavily Blurred People In Security Videos
itwbennett writes Fujitsu has developed image-processing technology that can be used to track people in security camera footage, even when the images are heavily blurred to protect their privacy. The company says that detecting the movements of people in this way could be useful for retail design, reducing pedestrian congestion in crowded urban areas or improving evacuation routes for emergencies. An indoor test of the system was able to track the paths of 80 percent of test subjects, according to the company.
Like any retailer would be interested in protecting the privacy of their shoppers identity while still wanting to track them.
What this may get used for is things like tracking shoplifters. Wal-Mart and other large retailers will take down your name, driver's license number, SSN, and take your picture if you get caught shoplifting, with a warning that you are not allowed back on the company property, or they will consider it trespassing.
A system like this could be used to automatically track people who have shoplifted to either get tailed by security or kicked out of the store (and possibly charged with trespassing). It also wouldn't surprise me for the companies to share this info, either directly or through a background check / data-broker company, of which many already exist. Imagine being locked out of 90% of retailers in the country for shoplifting some candy when you were 17...
the upper class clowns are going to have a field day with this.
"i'm telling you, all the experts agree, this blurry photo proves,
that you (and not us) had done that"
I read about tech many years ago which probably works in a similar; if not better way.
You track the motion of the object in the images (or the whole image) with high precision and then you exploit that information and the fact that a pixel is an average sample over the path traveled. You can then make assumptions about what is noise and what pixels representing that object in motion over that path is. That is the basics of the image enhancement using motion data-- it's even easier when it is video because then you have much more data to work from as well as more samples of motion data.
> Fujitsu has developed image-processing technology that can be used to track people ... even when the images are heavily blurred to protect their privacy.
If you think about it, this is obviously related to anime. Who can explain why?
Fujitsu's official reasoning of "useful for retail design, reducing pedestrian congestion in crowded urban areas or improving evacuation routes" is just a distraction.
Enhance...enhance...enhance.
Just like on the movies.
My path through the grocery store is pretty consistent. Wander through produce looking for what I need. Beeline to the back wall, where the meat is. Head to eggs/dairy, next to the meat. Hang a 180, down the frozen foods aisle, hang a left, where the deli is for my meat and cheese for the week. Do a 180, head to the checkout.
Every other month or so I need something like fish sauce, olive oil, etc, and then they can track me wandering aimlessly down the aisles, if they had microphones they'd hear me muttering "dammit, why don't they label the aisles better" and "dammit, where's the damned kimchi"
Staples like tomato sauce, chicken stock, etc are bought a couple times a year at Costco.
Damn, it must be very painful to be heavily blurred, unless maybe you mean inebriated, but then everybody else is blurred, you still have the same ruddy complexion.
All it can do it identify that a person entered at one point followed a certain path and exited at a certain point. It can not identify who that person is. It is useful to see where to place certain items for easier access to popular items. I knew the tinfoil had brigade would get it wrong.
Privacy is simply not an issue if one is inside a business or on a sidewalk. Those are both public situations in which there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Anything done within the view of others is by definition a public display. There is an ongoing trend to obscure the meaning of privacy when in reality what many people are doing is wanting to escape accountability.
If you know how the image was blurred, and you know you should be looking at a picture of a face, isn't it straightforward enough to design a video filter algorithm that could come up with a few unique variables values to track? Maybe the trick here is how to do it quickly enough to process live video and track people in realtime with a standard desktop-class system?.