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China Working On 'Repression Network' Which Lets Cameras Identify Cars With Unprecedented Accuracy (thesun.co.uk)
schwit1 shares a report from The Sun: Researchers at a Chinese university have revealed the results of an investigation aimed at creating a "repression network" which can identify cars from "customized paintings, decorations or even scratches" rather than by scanning its number plate. A team from Peking University said the technology they have developed to perform this task could also be used to recognize the faces of human beings. Essentially, it works by learning from what it sees, allowing it to differentiate between cars (or humans) by spotting small differences between them. "The growing explosion in the use of surveillance cameras in public security highlights the importance of vehicle search from large-scale image databases," the researcher wrote. "Precise vehicle search, aiming at finding out all instances for a given query vehicle image, is a challenging task as different vehicles will look very similar to each other if they share same visual attributes." They added: "We can extend our framework [software] into wider applications like face and
person retrieval [identification] as well."
We already know our police drive around parking lots scanning license plates. This builds up a nice amount of location data of where the vehicle goes. Since it's in the public space, they get to do this.
I wouldn't be surprised if any public cameras or perhaps red light cameras weren't sending location data of each and every car either.
It's terrible and we as a society shouldn't tolerate it, but the majority will let it happen until things all fall apart. Unfortunately just how most of us humans are.
If the network is ran in US, it is a "freedom" network. Spreading freedom can also mean dropping bombs and starting wars oversea.
Mass-surveillance is really a sword with two edges. It's really useful for crime investigation and stuff, but there's also the usual "muh privacy" concerns.
How can we find a balance?
dam the days of packing snow on the plate to skip tolls are over.
How much violent crime occurs in China? I could understand super surveillance in Chicago where there is mad violent crime. If we are moving to asurveillance society we need laws that stipulate that the video can only be obtained/decrypted with a search warrant. Also, that no crime less serious than felony assault can be charged based on the surveillance video.
Video should be real-time encrypted with the decryption key securely held by third parties. If video of you running on the street naked leaks that's too bad. Don't do F'd up things outside the privacy of your home. You shouldn't expect privacy on public streets. We have the right to watch out neighborhoods. Total video surveillance can reduce serious crime by allowing the perps to be caught.
But the days of packing my DAMN balls on ur chin have just begun
Sounds like a solution that won't work well outside of Asia and Chinatown, but thanks for trying.
/. Mod Fail
Just looking at the technology alone, it seems like this would be a problematic system, especially if you want to evade it. Car scratches and dents can be repaired, increase in number or even be faked (decals). Something as simple as your car being dirty and then cleaning it would fool such a system until it read your plate again. However, this just means it's good for short term recognition using high resolution cameras. The same applies for using it on people.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
... can't be far behind. Eg. maybe they'll discover you can put clear tape on your car with a fake scratch printed on it, to be changed every day. Looks like technology will again help make life more complicated by a notch.
...but when China does it's a "repression network".
Zuckerberg not being a government official (yet) doesn't make him any less Big Brother.
To make matters worse, moz://a has recently announced the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative.
In their words:
So it sounds to me like Mozilla wants to perhaps control what content is available online, or at the very least be the one who deems what is "correct" and what isn't.
How they hope to accomplish any of that with a browser that has only 5% of the market now, and is also likely losing users, is a mystery to me, however!
This makes the Firefox 57 release not seem so bad now. With the switch to WebExtensions, it's expected that many existing extensions will no longer work. This will likely drive away even more of its few remaining users, rendering it even less relevant. If Mozilla wants to be policing online content in any way, then I think we're better off having fewer people using Firefox!
which can identify cars from "customized paintings, decorations or even scratches"
So time to paint the car with eInk that can change randomly. Fake scratches and dents that move around and change shape.
China's investment in surveillance tech means that you can buy some really amazing weatherproof high-resolution varifocal cameras from Chinese manufacturers (e.g. Dahua) for a fraction of what such cameras cost ten years ago.
It's revolutionizing home and business surveillance in the U.S.A.
Next up; Santa Clara county.
Attach a band aid to the exterior of the car and the identification system will fail. Any alteration in the cars appearance will drive current computers bonkers. As it stands right now the cops can read the plates of every car they pass and get a hit on which cars are stolen. But as it stands lots of car thieves are being taken away due to the current technology. It will become a much more robust system with more and more recording stations set up to catch people.
Since when do headlines claim " did X" when someone in some university did X?
Oh yeah, when it comes to China and Russia, then any individual action you don't like becomes state action in the headlines.
"America Working On DNA-Based Exploit of a Computer System - which use faked blood or spit samples to gain access to university computers, steal information from police forensics labs, or infect genome files shared by scientists"
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
"America Fires Red Team Staffers Who Gave Defcon Talk"
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
"America Shamed, Smeared and Fired Engineer For Speaking Out"
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Fake news much?
NOT!
Caution: Contents under pressure
Who got hit on the chin by more balls?
1) Yogi Berra
2) Rock Hudson
Said the Google employee.
Too bad not all of you can be as progressive as Mozilla. Have fun at your town hall meeting, neanderthal.
...to help self-driving cars correctly identify defaced street signs.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
What are they gonna say? You're fined $100 because they took a picture of a car that 'looked' like yours? Prove it!
Yeah, being able to identify stolen cars even after they have had a paint job is repression, of course it is. Everybody knows it is basic human right, stealing other people's cars and selling them on.
[quote][...]could also be used to recognize the faces of human beings. Essentially, it works by learning from what it sees, allowing it to differentiate between cars (or humans) by spotting small differences between them.[/quote]
Is that the Chinese government's way of saying that all those Chinks look the same to them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is just an idea published by some Chinese researchers, actually a fairly pedestrian idea based on recent approaches to machine learning in computer vision. The researchers were clever in choosing a controversial name for their approach ("a repression network"), but there is no indication that this approach is actually used anywhere, in China or elsewhere, whether it would scales to millions of cars.
BTW this is the same thing with face recognition. On curated databases of tens of thousands of faces taken in reasonably good condition, face recognition achieves very high scores, better than humans (who would remember 10,000 faces?) but in the real world, not so much, the technology is not that useful yet in practice. It will probably come though, eventually.
Now I can sell millions of magnetic scratch and imperfections decalcs in China.
What will China come up with next? A Mobile Oppression Palace?
Perhaps Matt Groening shouldn't give them any more ideas.
Oh China...
We just saw that self-driving cars can be fooled by putting a strip of duct tape on a stop sign. I'm not sure how realistically accurate this is going to end up being.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
This will help keep you anonymous.
As usual, China copies western tech. A 'Repression Network' is already deployed in Google offices.
Now we'll start seeing that deployed in the US.