
Tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, yet 80% of crime unsolved - danw
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-details/Tens+of+thousands+of+CCTV+cameras%2C+yet+80%25+of+crime+unsolved/article.do
======
ivankirigin
I've worked in automated surveillance. No one is watching the feeds.

A trained professional watching a single video feed will miss 90% of important
activity after 20 minutes. There are 3 million CCTV cameras in the UK.

Like I said, no one is watching.

But automated surveillance is getting very good. A single server can currently
run around 5 video streams. At least that was what Intellivid could do last I
spoke with them. They do retail loss prevention. They're based in Cambridge
and look like a good company for any hackers. www.intellivid.com

Very, very soon, all of these CCTVs are going to be "turned on". Computers
will find anomalous behavior, identify people from their gait (how they walk
-- surprisingly more reliable than face recognition), track them across
multiple cameras even with large gaps in footage, etc.. Gunshot detection and
localization is pretty easy, but goes beyond the camera systems.

There is a book everyone interested in the topic needs to read on the subject:
The Transparent Society [http://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-
Between...](http://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Society-Technology-Between-
Privacy/dp/0738201448/)

The solution is not regressing. The systems are here.

The solution is openness. Almost all government CCTV feeds should be open to
public view, for example.

~~~
pixcavator
>The solution is openness. Almost all government CCTV feeds should be open to
public view, for example.

Second that. Just put them on the internet, how hard is that?

~~~
ivankirigin
Very, very hard actually.

justin.tv was happy about 14000 simultaneous feeds. How would you make the
data transmission backbone to accommodate something 1000 times bigger?

The big push for automated surveillance is in fact a response to network
usage. It used to be that you record onto tapes. Everyone thought that stunk,
so they started recording to DVRs. But then you need to transmit lots of
imagery to central servers. It would make more sense to put some intelligence
on the camera end and only transmit when something interesting is going on.
For example, reliable motion detection would only send video when there is
something new in the scene.

But either way, yes, everything should be online all the time.

------
byrneseyeview
"In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record
of solving crime that is below average."

I really hate when they don't tell you the marginal benefit, just the absolute
result. I would assume that the places with the most cameras are the ones with
the most crime.

(The relevant urban legend is that some time in 1917, Ukrainian communist
rebels noticed that the provinces with the most sick people also had the most
doctors -- so they rose up and killed the doctors)

------
mynameishere
On the bright side, horseplay is down 40%, youthful exuberance has been cut in
half, high spirits are at an all-time low.

~~~
darkclark
The beatings will continue until morale improves!

