October 12, 2005

Mobile Video Surveillance Systems in Chicago Police Vehicles

From Government Technology:

Global ePoint, Inc. has deployed an order from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) for Sequent Ranger 350i, mobile digital video surveillance systems.The deployment is part of a pilot program to install cameras in a minimum of 12 squad cars. According to the CPD preliminary estimates indicate that equipping one squad car with digital video capacity could cost up to $5,000. There are currently 1,800 marked squad cars in the Department's fleet. The Department says it will aggressively seek state funding for the program and will explore what Federal grants are available.

The CPD is utilizing the Sequent Ranger system to deliver streaming video surveillance wirelessly from mobile surveillance vehicles that can be deployed any where in the city. The systems provide a complete end-to-end video surveillance solution; from in-vehicle front-end surveillance to a back-end server for video data management.

The Ranger's video streaming capabilities are currently integrated into the Chicago Police Department's internal Internet. This allows police headquarters to share information with police officers already deployed in the field and other municipal departments.

The Ranger is currently used in various vehicle platforms ranging from a police modified ambulance utilizing a 60 ft. retractable mast for traffic monitoring and special event monitoring, and to allow officials visual access to major incidents. Global ePoint's video streaming capabilities are also used in covert pickup trucks for monitoring high crime areas among offices in different districts.

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Video Surveillance Market

From a Press Release:

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (www.autoID.frost.com), World Video Surveillance Software Markets, reveals that market revenues totaled $153.7 million in 2004 and expects to reach $670.7 million in 2011.

Posted by rshah at 08:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 11, 2005

Cell Phones for Traffic Monitoring

From The Newspaper:
The Newspaper, which incidentally seems like a useful resource for those interested in the intersection of cameras and traffic, writes about a program in Missouri to use cell phones to track cars:

Delcan NET, a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle, opening up another potential ticketing technology.

Missouri rejected the simpler solution used by other states of embedding sensors in the pavement that record how many vehicles pass over a stretch of pavement without uniquely identifying them. Missouri wanted a program that required less equipment."The traffic community has been really excited for quite some time about the possibility of being able to use cell phones to track vehicles," Valerie Briggs, program manager for transportation operations at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials told the Associated Press. "Almost everyone has a cell phone, so you have a lot of potential data points, and you can track data almost anywhere on the whole (road) system."

A pilot program in Baltimore only tracks Cingular cell phones on 1,000 miles of road. AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia.

Update: the NY Times has a article on using cellphones to address congestion.

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October 10, 2005

Automatic License Plate Scanners

From Schneier on Security

One of the oldest smart camera technologies is Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR). As the archives of this blog will point out, this technology is widely used in the UK, but rarely used in the US. I have no doubt that we are only one big media story away from widespread use of ANPR in the US. The article Schneier discusses is a car that drives around the city using ANPR to find cars with unpaid traffic tickets. Its not much of a leap to see this technology being used to identify users with other outstanding warrants. Moreover, there are unanswered questions about how the ANPR data will be handled.

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October 04, 2005

Gunshot detection by iRobot

From CNET News.com:

Another gun shot detection system, called Redowl from iRobot, however this one is designed to be mobile (it works with the Packbot). Some quotes from the article:

the company announced a prototype system designed to pinpoint incoming rounds from rifles and mortars, and also to provide surveillance and targeting capabilities. The remote-controlled gear, named Redowl (short for "robot enhanced detection outpost with lasers), is designed to work with iRobot's PackBot combat device.

Redowl features a laser pointer and illuminator, an acoustic localizer and classifier, a thermal imager, GPS (Global Positioning System), an infrared and daylight camera, and two wide-angle cameras. iRobot, which also makes the Roomba household vacuum robot, developed the Redowl system in conjunction with the Photonics Center at Boston University.

In field tests, the PackBot-Redowl combination had a success rate of 94 percent in locating the source of rounds fired from 9mm pistols, and M-16 and AK-rifles, at a range of more than 100 meters, the company said.

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