I have a Nikon P900, which I bought 4 years ago. I think it would be able to identify a license plate from 1km too. I took a photo of a couple at a restaurant ~3km away, and you could identify the gender and skin color.
The P900 has been succeeded by the P1000, which is the same focal length as this one.
You can look at airliners and read the tail numbers. At high zoom levels tracking the airliners is the hard part. You have to have a steady hand, although the image stabilization really helps. It also has a quick-zoom
feature allowing you to zoom-out, locate and center something and snap back
quickly.
The article seems to indiate the p1000 doesn't have optical image stabilization, but it does.
But the p1000 does NOT have ISO 819200 or heat haze correction. That sounds pretty cool. With the p1000 you will see atmospheric shimmering pretty often.
There _are_ security systems that stream a lower bandwidth zoomed out stream to clients reviewing footage, then sub in the full resolution version of the region being viewed when you zoom in, as a bandwidth savings mechanism - multiple 30Mpx camera feeds are impractical to stream around all the time.
Of course, they automatically substitute this when you zoom, they don't make you click "enhance", that'd be terrible UX.
I thought it was pretty cool. Almost everything is legos now; you can't claim something isn't novel just because the components exist independently - if they haven't been used in that combination I say it's still novel.
"What's the breakthrough here? It seems they just mated peanut butter with jelly between two slices of bread, all of which we've already had for decades"
> It’s got a fast autofocus that can focus in as quickly as 0.3 seconds, optical image stabilization, and an image processing engine that’s able to reduce the effects of fog and heat-haze. The camera also supports ISO levels of up to 819200 for filming at night
This is the novelty. Basically improving on other camera systems by making the optics better. There are plenty of surveillance cameras that offer a similar set of features but perhaps with lower specs (slower AF, less effective processing algorithms, etc.). But I don't think they claimed to be a breakthrough invention, just an excellent first step into the field and a possible improvement over some of the competing offerings. This is more or less standard for border security applications, as an example [0].
There are many extreme long range surveillance systems that probably do a lot better... at potentially multiple hundreds of thousands of $ per unit.
Pretty much. After that it's all been wheels. Take the lenses, that's just a wheel with a piece of glass on each side, easy. The camera? More wheels of different sizes somewhat cleverly put together to capture light and store it - boring. It's almost depressing really, kids nowadays don't know how to make new things, just strap two things together with tape.
As the world fractally unfolds, this idea — that there are obvious things that have already been done and nonobvious things that only very smart people can figure out – is going to stop making sense on the face of it.
We are all very smart. But the universe is also very vast. We do not have all — not nearly all — of even the basic, bronze-age technologies that an alternate human civilization could have developed.
Of course there are simple tricks left involving photosensitive semiconductors and modern optical engineering, is my point.
Not impressed. What is the (field of view) FOV at the 1km distance? Extremely narrow I assume.. IF they can read 1km away with a wide FOV, then color me impressed!
People often discuss of surveillance in the context of companies they interact with every day, but kinds of tools like this camera are typically used by public services. What 's the discussion about privacy wrt to the data that govt services have? Event GDPR glossed it over, giving these services basically free reign.
Georgia Power has recently started to sell license plate scanners to police departments in my area. They use their utility poles to place small cameras that scan each license plate and alert authorities when a stolen car is spotted.
The city I used to live in did a trial. They recovered more stolen cars in the first month they tried it than the whole year before. Here’s a press release about the program in general[1].
Not one word in that press release about privacy safeguards.
The benefits are real, but without safeguards it will be abused: police officers and, in this case, also power utility workers likely have full, unaudited access to this data. That means they'll use it to stalk and harass people, e.g. ex-girlfriends, in addition to legit uses.
>That means they'll use it to stalk and harass people, e.g. ex-girlfriends
This is such a common trope, and it should be fairly well-known by now how so many American cops are basically bullies with guns, that I really have to wonder why any sane woman would ever date one. Horror stories about the things the ex-girlfriends and ex-wives of cops have gone through have been around for many decades, it's not something new. I have seen a non-negligible number of women on online dating sites who have specifically said they would not date anyone in law enforcement.
I'm far more worried about the use case where the people in power decide to robo-fine everyone for everything and do not get tarred and feathered in response than I am about a few cops stalking their exes. The latter we basically all agree is not ok (and there's existing well known channels for punishing that kind of stuff when it happens). The former makes our society worse and we have no good way of countering it until it becomes revolt worthy.
Yeah, I like the idea of stolen cars being found very quickly, but there's a huge potential for this to be abused and used for robo-fining, which would truly be awful, and reminds me a lot of that 90s movie "Demolition Man".
Depending on where you live, recording passing license plates could be very unlawful, and leave you open to significant penalties, so best to check before you set something like this up.
The stolen cars thing seems to be the goto for making these okay in places. People think about a car being stolen or carjacked and want the masked armed robbers taken out. However I believe most of the 'stolen cars' they are actually looking for and finding are cars where someone is being in their car payments and a repo notice gets sent out..
technically the car is stolen from the place that holds the note.. but I don't think the malls and other places that have installed these and sold the data are really wanting to put our press releases about how many broke people late on their payments they turned over to repo men/women..
They used that excuse to put some in at the airport near here, but I have second hand knowledge that they have been used to Id other people and investigate other things, so that data is not in a read - only - plates put into the db that are stolen and get info back, it's db data that is there and searchable shareable for other reasons, most the general public may never know.
You should check out the Radiolab episode, "Eye in the Sky" for the super-creepy ramifications of filming everything all of the time.
Everything is a balance between privacy and security. In a perfect world the cameras wouldn't be abused, but in a perfect world there wouldn't be any crime.
Personally I think we don't need any more tracking in our lives, and I'd gladly swap some stolen cars in order to avoid a surveillance dystopia.
Honest question: How did GDPR gloss over it? That law is just as applicable to government as to business? And we have both GDPR and transparancy laws to aid those willing to search for transgressions. Only nit I know of is that fines to the government are fines to the public, with less of a possibility to shop elsewhere or the firm to face consequences from say shareholders (in extreme: a high fine means higher taxes).
That's a very optimistic reading of GDPR. In practice, LEO agencies legal counsel has to write them a compliance rationale doc supporting their need to use private data and that's it. I bet activists are gearing up to challenge some of those rationales in courts but those will be speed bumps at most. It's hard to see the judiciary constraining the powers that law enforcement traditionally had.
I know of some Romanian park rangers who temporarily lost their fining powers until their GDPR compliance gets sorted out - they're low priority compared to other LEO agencies. It's funny to think that people degrading natural parks is a consequence of GDPR, yet here we are.
Unless you have some specific LEO capability you wish GDPR eliminated, it's hard to see GDPR as anything else than an compliance burden on government agencies.
The P900 has been succeeded by the P1000, which is the same focal length as this one.