Next Generation Surveillance Cameras

from the making-surveillance-an-artform dept

If you think current surveillance cameras are already too intrusive, just wait until you see what's coming down the road. PC Magazine has an article talking about these new systems that basically put a camera in a flight recorder box and then just start adding features such as wireless connectivity and GPS. They also claim it has "metadata capabilities" which means absolutely nothing, but must have sounded good to the reporter. What's funny, though, is for all the possibilities such a camera might be used for, the best the article can come up with is letting the police use it to find speeding motorists. However, there are other ways this could be used. Add in some facial recognition software, and a link so some major databases, and just think of what you could do with such a thing.
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  1. identicon
    Chris, 6 Feb 2003 @ 1:01pm

    No Subject Given

    Before we moved last fall, I had a security camera on my house that was about the size of a golf ball, had infrared capabilities, and worked in very little light. It also had a microphone that picked up my neighbors conversations. It was connected to a VCR via a box that turned on the VCR to record anytime the motion detector in the camera picked up motion in front of my house. I put the system together for $300. It's cool, but also scary, at how little you spend to get very powerful technology today.
    note - my car had been broken into twice - thus the camera. I'm not some weirdo vouyer :)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Lorenzo, 7 Feb 2003 @ 1:12am

    metadata means something in video

    Mike,

    Survaillance cameras are heavy users of mpegs formats (and wireless connectivity of any sort as well): Mpeg is a VIDEO format which is going to be substituted by MXF, which is a FILE format which will wrap all existing video formats (Mpeg, AVi, QT, WM name one they ll add it) in metada. That means cams will automatically writing data to the video format (like GPS position) but also all devices that handle the video will be leaving traces on it (in broadcast production is meant to facilitate various steps of production, but of course it could be the base for a effective framework of legal validation of the survellaince video itsels.)

    In case more info on MXF (not security uses of it) can be found in places like http://www.broadcastpapers.com .

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    lorenzo, 7 Feb 2003 @ 1:34am

    and don t forget object recognition in mpegs

    forgot, also future mpegs will work around the capability of recognizing shaped within the image and build compression around these shapes.

    so, future mpegs support image searches, i.e. search engine can be built that look for certain shapes in a video and one can surely develop a dedicated search engine for face recognition. Costs of surveillance will come down dramatically because it is all natively supported in the format.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. icon
    Mike (profile), 7 Feb 2003 @ 1:51am

    Re: and don t forget object recognition in mpegs

    Thanks for the very informative posts...

    link to this | view in thread ]


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