April 29, 2005

Smart cameras for social control and military domination

Online Journal is carrying a story by Andrew Kaluki, which is the best general overview article I have seen lately on the social implications of using smart cameras. He has an excellent web site titled Automated Surveillance.

The article is full of examples of how smart cameras are being used. Including some that I did not know. For example:

In Manalapan, Florida—one of the nation's wealthiest cities—cameras and computers have been set up to run background checks on every car and driver that enters [10]. The system alerts a 911 dispatcher if the car is stolen or the driver is suspected of a crime. Infrared cameras record each car's license tag number, and other cameras photograph the driver.

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April 23, 2005

Video Investigator from Intellivid

From Intellivid:
They offer smart cameras for theft prevention. According to their web site, their technology allows you to:

Track suspects across multiple cameras without knowing camera names or locations. Computer-aided tracking (CAT) enables you to follow suspects even when you're unfamiliar with a facility

Receive real-time alerts: Monitor high value assets or restricted areas automatically with Video Article Surveillance™ (VAS)

Find people instantly by simply highlighting a region of interest

Manage and communicate investigation results easily and quickly: Integrated investigation management enables you to capture, combine and communicate video evidence and case notes quickly and easily

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April 21, 2005

New system catches speeders without radar or lasers

From Engadget:
New system catches speeders without radar or lasers:
See theNewspaper.com:

University of Florida researchers believe they have outwitted the makers of radar detectors and other speed detection countermeasures. Using a $5 million grant from the Air Force, they've developed software that can use live video camera footage to recognize objects and measure their speed. It does so by calculating the distance a car moves in a series of photos compared to a fixed object -- such as a light pole -- in the background. Because the system is entirely passive, unlike conventional laser and radar speed guns, it cannot be detected.
The system is similar to the SPECS speed averaging cameras in use in the UK and Australia. The latter system uses multiple cameras to calculate a car's speed over a known, fixed distance. The researchers believe they can create a device has two big advantages over SPECS -- it would be entirely mobile and it would work with a single camera. Additional details on their research will be published in the latest issue of IEEE's Transactions on Robotics and Automation.

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April 15, 2005

CIO on Video Surveillance

CIO has a great article on the growing market of video surveillance:
(I took a large snippets, because this is a very meaty article)

Proving ROI on digital surveillance may not be as hard as you think either. The post-9/11 obsession with security created this surge in surveillance investment, but what’s sustaining it is that digital video surveillance appears to be living up to its hype. And, when done well, it provides real ROI for the business. First off, it allows for consolidation of monitoring: You can watch many geographically disperse sites from one control room—something that was impossible with closed-circuit systems. An even bigger benefit of digital is that central control and monitoring allows you to put cameras at smaller sites and monitor them from the central operations center. With CCTV, you’d require a closed system at that smaller site and onsite monitoring, which itself requires at least one employee. Digital video also beats tape in terms of storage and retrieval. Tape-based systems can require a full-time employee just for retrieval. (For even more benefits, see “The Little Things,” this page.)

But the key to IP-based video surveillance’s appeal is the ever-expanding roster of applications being attached to it. In other words, surveillance isn’t just about security anymore. For example, British bed superstore Dreams recently deployed video surveillance for measuring foot traffic through a store to understand both peak traffic times and also shoppers’ browsing habits, which in turn allows them to better configure merchandise around the store. Of course the surveillance is used for security as well, but it’s also being utilized to train new employees.

Training, in fact, has become a possible killer applet for video surveillance, due in large part to the increased quality of the images. Video of cashiers at a grocery store doing their jobs correctly (and incorrectly) is edited into video packages that train new hires. Sandy Jones, a surveillance consultant, says Dreams isn’t alone in its use of cameras to assist retail; other companies are using surveillance for similar purposes. Still others are using cameras to improve logistics, assembling trains at humpyards (where the rail cars come off boats and trucks), for example, or monitoring assembly lines for quality control. Suddenly, surveillance is a business enabler, not just barbed wire.

Many CIOs say they spend considerable time fending off aggressive surveillance vendors. “I almost canceled our contract twice over what I thought was really aggressive behavior,” says Greg Meffert, CTO of the City of New Orleans, who is in the middle of a citywide surveillance project that will eventually include 1,000 wireless, IP-based cameras. “All they wanted to do was tell me how great I was and then, ‘Why aren’t you rolling this out faster?’”

“The vendors are coming at us with the ‘wow’ factor,” says Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport’s Bowen. “If you don’t pay significant attention to it, you’ll buy lots of things that can do lots of stuff, but your [total cost of ownership] and integration will be no good.”

Meffert provides a great example of a successful, IT-driven digital video surveillance deployment. When the current New Orleans city administration came into office, he says, the city had about two days worth of cash on hand and ranked at the bottom of a list of major cities when it came to technology infrastructure. “Everything we could do had to either be budget-neutral or save us money,” he says. New Orleans’ paramount problem was its murder rate, the highest of any city in the country, and Meffert believed a high-end wireless surveillance system with motion detection could help. But that would require a huge investment in the neighborhood of $300,000 just to start a pilot.

To jump-start the program, Meffert piloted the system in one of the highest-crime areas of the city. In six months, the murder rate in this area dropped 57 percent; auto theft, 25 percent; and burglary, 32 percent. He then started a website, Iseecrime.com, where neighborhood watch groups could sign up to become part of the city’s surveillance network. For $5,000, people could “adopt” a camera, and the city would integrate those views with its overall surveillance operations. In two days, Meffert says 220 groups and individuals registered. “That’s a million bucks right there,” he says.

All this success convinced the city to up its investment to more than $4 million for the first 300 cameras and to deploy as many as 1,000 cameras around New Orleans. (Right as Meffert started his pilot, the American Civil Liberties Union filed two restraining orders and threatened a lawsuit against the city; privacy and ethics issues abound and should not be discounted.)

But Meffert believes that the public safety rewards outweigh the privacy issues. He recalls an incident in which someone shot one of the wireless cameras. When damaged, the cameras automatically send a signal to police headquarters along with the last 10 minutes of footage from the location. (There’s up to a week’s worth of footage archived from every camera at any given time, depending on the camera’s setup.) Headquarters reviewed the video and forwarded it to a cruiser in the area. Meffert says those officers quickly tracked down the suspect who, it appeared, had done more than shoot at cameras. He was wanted for murder.

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April 06, 2005

ObjectVideo in Time

Time has a story on Objectvideo's technology.

The article notes that Objectvideo was founded in 1998 by DARPA scientists and venture capitalists in Reston, Virginia. Objectvideo is deploying an advanced surveillance system across the nation's borders. Additionally, the Navy is testing it to observe small crafts nearing their ships.

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April 03, 2005

Profits in Video Surveillance

A Reuters story has a few interesting facts:

The surveillance camera market has swelled to between $5 billion and $6 billion from about $2 billion before Sept. 11 — and will grow at 25 percent a year, Greiper said.

New technology allows cameras at sensitive federal buildings, major ports and transit hubs to differentiate between people and the objects they carry. If someone leaves a briefcase in an elevator at the Pentagon, for example, the camera will look back to find who left it and send the person's picture to a guard's hand-held security device.

Nice Systems, which makes this kind of technology, has seen its share price jump nearly 50 percent to about $32 in the past five months. In February, the Israeli company reported earnings of 47 cents a share, up from 9 cents a year earlier.

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