

Big Brother is not watching you - gaius
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1095609/Big-brother-NOT-watching-Cash-strapped-towns-leave-CCTV-cameras-unmonitored.html?ITO=1490

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prospero
I work for a company in this space. Our product tracks and describes things of
interest (faces, text, moving objects), and allows the user to search for
similar items at other times and on other cameras. It doesn't make security
guards obsolete by any stretch, but it can make reviewing past footage much
less tedious.

The whole "intelligent video" industry is in its infancy. An interesting
point, though, is as these analytics improve, so does our ability to limit the
scope of video that can be watched. Irrelevant footage can be made off-limits,
faces or license plates obscured, etc.

It's not going to happen overnight, but the trend is clear: surveillance video
is going to become more structured as time goes on. But this can be used to
uphold personal rights as easily as it can be used to bypass them. Laws will
just have to adapt in the face of technology.

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khafra
I'm afraid it's much easier to bypass personal rights than to uphold them.
Even though the technology for either is there, the panopticon is a design
pattern that keeps occurring in political space.

I'm curious, though--does your company do the kind of thing covered by Steve
Rambam in his talk at The Last HOPE _? ie, recognition of activities as well
as of faces, text, etc.?

_
[http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speak...](http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speaker_-
_Steven_Rambam_)(Part_1).mp3
[http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speak...](http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speaker_-
_Steven_Rambam_)(Part_2).mp3

~~~
prospero
Activity is an awfully vague term.

I know of one company that's hired professional actors to act out different
scenarios, in the hopes that they can distill the essence of suspicious
activity, and thereby automatically detect it. I'm not optimistic about their
chances.

However, it's relatively straightforward to detect people tailgating at
security entrances (using one passcard to let two people in), or walking the
wrong way into the exit gate at an airport. In both these situations, though,
the environment is controlled, and the difference between proper and improper
behavior is well-defined. Neither of these things are true on, say, a street
corner.

Human interaction and body language is _complicated_. I expect we'll have a
good way of automatically detecting behavior sometime around when we have
general artificial intelligences, and not before.

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Anon84
That's debatable... if they store the footage and are able to produce it upon
a law enforcement/court request then Big Brother is still watching, when it
matters.

Might be a good opportunity for a real-time image analysis start up, though...

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sh1mmer
The cameras can't look everywhere, without operators helping to guide where
they should be looking there are lots of things they miss, or potentially
incriminating evidence they miss.

For example, if a crime is committed but the criminals face isn't seen, it's
the camera operators that track them until they run into another camera on the
system that has been angled to see their face. A system running on autopilot
is going to miss a lot of that.

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ivankirigin
I used to work in automated surveillance.

Studies show a trained operator will miss 90% of events looking at a single
feed after just 20 minutes. It's even worse over a longer time and over
multiple camera feeds.

No one is really watching.

Once automated surveillance gets better, that won't be the case at all. The
systems are only currently useful for after-the-fact forensics.

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robertk
They monitor(ed) the CCTV footage _on the spot_?

Jesus, that makes it even worse. The only places I've heard that at is high-
security corporate and military locations. Certainly not town squares.

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ashleyw
Yep, they definably did in my town — cause they had massive speakers attached,
and the people monitoring the cameras could (and did on many occasions which I
witnessed) shout at people for littering and causing trouble.

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Stubbs
I wish the original site was included in the RSS feed then I wouldn't have to
read anything from this "news" source any more, I hereby coin the phrase
Mailrolled.

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bprater
Eventually, computers will be able to do the job of the human, and 4 million
cameras won't be a problem to watch.

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axod
This is not Reddit thankyou.

