Video Surveillance Identifies Threat Patterns

Ponca City, We Love You writes "When the 2008 Olympic Games kick off in Beijing next year, organizers will be using a sophisticated computer system to scan video images of city streets looking for everything from troublemakers to terrorists. The IBM system, called the Smart Surveillance System, uses analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected. It can be used to warn security guards when someone has entered a secure area or keep track of cars coming in and out of a parking lot. The system can also search through old event data to find patterns that can be used to enable new security strategies and identify potential vulnerabilities. IBM is also developing a similar surveillance system for lower Manhattan, but has not yet begun deploying that project. "Physical security and IT security are starting to come together," says Julie Donahue, vice president of security and privacy services with IBM. "A lot of the guys I'm meeting on the IT side are just starting to get involved on the physical side.""

What we all need

Ahh, finally more survaillance, and computers to monitor the cameras.

Pattern recognition to identify threats, before trouble occurs.
Soon come the day when, we can finally arrest people, before they realise that they're going to do something criminal.

Re:What we all need

Soon come the day when, we can finally arrest people, before they realise that they're going to do something criminal.

Sounds like a cool movie plot. I think a good name for it would be The African American Report or maybe The Hispanic Report. You know, something like that.

Re:What we all need

Lets be real here.

The police try to find patterns in activity already, but it is far less effective for a relatively small group of people to look for patterns than it is for a computer with many cameras.

This is exactly what is already happening but faster.

When you are in public, you are in public.

Re:What we all need

Maybe what people are proposing is, get this: we need to redefine what 'public' is.

I think the problem is we are redefining what public is.

20 years ago, there was no expectation whatsoever that being in "public" meant your every move would be tracked by government officials potentially hundreds of miles away, and then stored for all time. That's not what "public" meant. People had an expectation that yes, anybody who was around you could potentially be watching you, but that kept it a relatively level playing field because you could pretty easily identify any threats to your privacy and avoid them if you like. If you were walking down an empty side street and needed to quickly adjust your belt because your pants were too loose, you could look around and do so without fear that cops are watching ready to jump you for "reaching for a concealed explosive" or even "intent to expose oneself in public" or whatever other nonsense law they can come up with.

That is the expectation we have always had for what "public" means - yes, you can be watched, but only by those around you, and that means that you can easily watch them back. Being able to be watched - and recorded - by someone many miles away is not what "public" means to me or anybody else. That's an intrusion, just like any other. You are being watched by people who are not there. And you have no idea what they're thinking or doing, even while they can watch your every move. It's a completely one-sided relationship where the other side has all the power. That's scary. And it's the exact opposite of what "being in public" is all about.

We don't need to redefine what public means, we need to take back its original meaning. Nobody should be allowed to watch a space that they do not own (ie. a public space) without being physically present.

Re:What we all need

I would much rather have a surveillance system like the one the article describes in place than an armed national guard member on every corner.

Ah, but the "armed national guard member" doesn't have a perfect memory and because of resource limitations, can't really exist on "every corner." But an "armed national guard member" can be dispatched to round people up either in real-time or after a review of the video. I'd rather that ubiquitous surveillance be as obvious as that, so that maybe the sheep get a little outraged and the "you don't have any right to privacy" and "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" apologists don't end up getting the world they want.

Re:What we all need

When you're in these places, you're in public. You're not in the privacy of your own home or anything like that. You're on public streets. By going out into public you've already given up a certain amount of anonymity de facto.

That makes perfect sense in the world of twenty years ago and the world we still mostly inhabit, but pervasive electronic surveillance threatens to change the meaning of statements like these. If you want to maintain the same rhetoric, make sure the words mean the same thing -- i.e., stop surveillance from de facto changing what it means to be in a public place versus a private place.

If you accept that "public place" means "a place where a detailed, permanent record of every action is captured and archived by the government," then you should rethink whether we want to have any "public places" at all. By that definition, perhaps only congressional chambers, courtrooms, jail cells, and the immediate vicinity of police officers should be public places.

I suppose...

China is a good testing ground for new surveillance tech... After all there is no illusion about there being no Big Brother. Then we're going to have it here (in Manhattan). Yup, we're still years ahead of China, aren't we?

ah, yes, /this/ stuff!

Ah, yes, I saw a video about this at my IBM internship back about two years ago. It was all internal/NDAed then. They showed the trails of people walking into and out of buildings, and cars zooming around parking lots, and neat things like that, even with lighting changes / moving trees blowing in the wind / other environmental visual noise. My internship project's team lead wanted us to try and exploit this for our project but it, ah, wasn't going to happen, and we did much less interesting things instead.

From what I understand, though, there's a nontrivial amount of hardware involved to process the video, and though that may be less of an issue these days with better computers, I'm wondering just how many CPUs they will be throwing at how many different video cameras for this.

And I'm sure it's imperfect and prone to false alarms and such, but that's why you put human beings behind it instead of machine guns, no?

Recognition logic

The recognition logic is fairly simple:

if (hoodie || foreign) police.respondto(camera.location);

Good *old* IBM

It's just like the old days, IBM looking for ways to "enhance security" [ibmandtheholocaust.com] and help the good old boys at the Department of Homeland Security (or, as the Germans called it, Schutzstaffel (S.S.)).

The important thing is, just like they had no idea their technology was helping make the holocaust more efficient and were just making a buck, it's completely unimaginable that the Chinese might continue to use it to crack down on dissidents afterwards.

Straight outta Metal Gear

As anyone who has played Metal Gear Solid 2 knows [wikipedia.org], S3 is a baaaad thing.

Involved on the physical side?

"Physical security and IT security are stating to come together," says Julie Donahue, vice president of security and privacy services with IBM. "A lot of the guys I'm meeting on the IT side are just starting to get involved on the physical side.""

That sounds as if she meant that IT staff started going to the gym - surely this recent datacenter break-in would look different then, just imagine the wrestler-looking sysadmin throwing office chairs and rack servers at the thieves...

so, are there any stats

On how many real life acts-of-terroris-in-the-making have been uncovered using cameras like this ? Iirc the only use they were in London was that *after* the bombings it was still possible to see what the bombers had looked like.

Never forget

If it weren't for the automation provided by IBM to the Third Reich, the Nazis would not have been able to keep tabs on and slaughter so many people. http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/ [ibmandtheholocaust.com]

'Do no evil.' isn't a motto IBM has, or ever will, adopt.

IBM and the N word

I'm sure you will all remember how the computer made for categorizing, keeping track of, and determining the fates of all those in Nazi control was in fact an IBM machine. There is a picture with the head of IBM sitting at a table with Hitler conferring on the computer design.

So now IBM is in cohorts with the militaristic China to determine people terrorists from a far-away camera through no human logic, just 0's and 1's again. And yes, the Manhattan project has been in the works for a long time, it is already underway with London's millions of cameras.

Big Brother is more than just a horrible TV show.

I just want to know when people will start learning from history.

I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords

Seriously, isn't this the kind of unbiased, behavior-based surveillance that we should be encouraging? The alternatives are (1) no surveillance in crowded, high profile events or (2) surveillance by humans with their weird biases about race, dress, headgear, etc.

No surveillance carries risk, human surveillance carries risk, and computerized surveillance carries risk. It just depends on which risks you are comfortable with.

RR

Sounds a lot like this

http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~jgryn/research/wacv_dirmaps.pdf [yorku.ca]

This is such bullshit

a sophisticated computer system to scan video images of city streets looking for everything from troublemakers to terrorists. The IBM system, called the Smart Surveillance System, uses analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected.

IBM's computer scientists must be getting paid quite a bit to endure the humiliation of making claims that every knowledgeable person knows are false.
These systems have been tested before, particularly in England, where Thatcher's government paid a shitload of money that could have been used for something useful, and the only useful thing they got out of it was well-designed studies that demonstrated that these screening systems don't work.
Here in Manhattan, we had a video monitoring system set up in the labyrnthine Columbus Circle subway station for a couple of years. It also had no effect on crime. (Nor did it have any effect on the cops beating up innocent people, who happened to be black.) The City took money that could have paid for more police (hopefully honest ones) and spent it on video toys instead. Duh.
Now we're getting these digital cameras all over NYC -- even though we have good data from England, from our own pilot programs, from the Atlanta Olympics, and elsewhere, that they don't do what their promoters claim. What it demonstrates is that a huckster can sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of useless digital junk to unscrupulous politicians accountable to a hysterical public and campaign contributors as long as it has blinking LEDs and they say the magic word "terrorism."
I challenge anyone to cite any scientific evidence, any pilot program -- not some security "expert"'s opinion -- that there are any computer "patterns" that can identify "troublemakers" or "terrorists".
Stop and think. The London suicide bombers walked on the subway with backpacks full of explosives. Innocent people go about their business on the subway all the time wearing backpacks. What pattern is there that a digital camera could spot?
The only good news in this story is that we Americans are finally ripping off the Chinese for a couple of hundred million dollars, which is good for the balance of trade. This is known in economics as the broken window fallacy.
Maybe we could sell them the Brooklyn Bridge too -- oh, wait, they already own it.

Mark my words

One of these days a hacker will get into such a system, find all images of people picking their nose, compile that together, and post it on youtube. At that point, then people will start thinking about the Big Brother implications.

Jack Bauer

This is the kind of backup that Jack Bauer gets from CTU.

Say what?

"I was at the Kennedy School (of Government at Harvard University) a couple of weeks ago, and some guy got up and said, "If there's a security incident at the Beijing Olympics, it's going to change the course of capitalism forever," and I'm like, 'Oh man!'" Donahue said.

I don't know which part of that quote from the NYT article disturbs me more.

IBM is not the only one

There is a scottish company that has been doing this sort of video analytics for years. Here is their website if you want to check it out: http://indigovision.com/ [indigovision.com]

They are in fact the only supplier that has delivered fully digital IP-CCTV for Casinos in United States. Casinos tend to be quite picky when it comes to surveillance. IndigoVision also did the Olympics in Athens etc. I do not work for them, but I have lived in Scotland and are aware of their business.

The also technology similar to IBM for detecting potential treats, setting areas of interest, blocking out private areas , object detection and removal etc etc. The best part is that this can also be done in realtime in the decoder box attached to the camera which allows for direct intergration with other security systems and allows for a distributed architecture. This in addition to also having this capability at the server end using the Network Video Recorders.

picks out all the people with "slanty eyes"

Irresistible racist joke here. Please forgive me.

Nothing new here

As someone who works in this industry, this is nothing new. Others [coe.co.uk] have [objectvideo.com] done [citilog.fr] it [ioimage.com] for years now (notice that all the companies linked here are based in different countries), but gotta love IBM for taking credit for something which they neither invented nor perfected.

The Evolution of Real ID?

Ever since I first got wind of Real ID, I've been predicting a system would eventually track every citizen in the country, enter their daily activity into a central database, then use the data to rate your activity based on your averages and finally flag you as a potential threat, alerting authorities to keep an eye on you more closely.

This sounds kind of like the early stages of such a system, except that it doesn't immediately know who you are.

I have a suggestion for IBM ...

Video Surveillance Identifies Threat Patterns

Maybe they could save some money on expensive computer hardware and use some of those picture-sorting dogs from the next story.

Good use for the Beijing Olympics

No doubt that many special-interest groups will want to disrupt the games to showcase their political agenda.

Pattern

IBM selling surveillance equipment [ibmandtheholocaust.com] to oppressive governments?

To complicated for computers to handle

I think its a mistake to try and use a computer system to try and prevent terrorism in this way. its hard to differentiate from valid and suspicious behavior. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

Simple Algorithm

Its only object regognition programmed to match any black, spherical object, approximately 12 inches in diameter with a burning piece of string protruding from the top.

China doesn't import T. Cruise?

Why pay IBM? I mean he's got the last Precog...