Video Surveillance Tech Detects Abnormal Activity 189
Repton writes with news of a company, Behavioral Recognition Systems, that has received 16 patents on a new video surveillance application that can convert video images into machine-readable language, and then analyze them for anomalies that suggest suspicious behavior in the camera's field of view. The software can 'recognize' up to 300 objects and establish a baseline of activity. It should go on sale in September. "...the BRS Labs technology will likely create a fair number of false positives, [the CEO] concedes. 'We think a three-to-one ratio of alerts to actual events is what the market will accept,' he says. 'We could be wrong.'"
grenade in mouth (Score:5, Informative)
I swear you must be a troll from Homeland Security...
That's like saying "Oh sure, it is worrisome that I have a live hand grenade with the pin pulled jammed in my mouth, but I don't think it would be extremely bad if it just blew off one of my pinky toes"
This kind of technology makes me want riot...ahem...i mean...to exercise my 1st amendment right to protest in a law abiding way.
I'm sickened. The CEO says: "We think a three-to-one ratio of alerts to actual events is what the market will accept."
Re:Doesn't need to be all that accurate (Score:4, Informative)
Stocktakes tell the store owner how much is being lost via theft. Economics being what it is, you can use this information to measure your security bang for buck and notice there is a point where diminishing returns makes eliminating the remaining false negatives a net loss. At this point your best option is to maintain the same level of risk aversion for less money. People who run large sets of cameras are the target market so IMHO the false negatives will be expected/ignored by the buyer, they (rational but non-technical bussiness buyers) will simply want to know what it all means for their bottom line.
Being the former architect of a... (Score:5, Informative)
...wide area surveillance system (which included video analytics for loitering, wrong way traffic in a crowd, crowd panic analysis, smoke/fire detection by video, et cetera) I can point out that there are MANY companies, corporate research groups, and universities that have been doing things like this for several years (in some cases almost 10 years.)
This company is in for a rude awakening when they realize that (a)their price per camera is extraordinarily high (this one metric is the biggest decider in large installation proposals [along with whether or not you have to mount the cameras on poles or just hallways/buildings]) and (b)a false alert rate of 3 to 1 is TOTALLY unacceptable. The entire purpose of video analytics in a security environment is to reduce the workload on the monitoring staff (and hopefully put more of them out into the field) while being able to scale up your coverage. I assure you that a 3 to 1 false alert rate will result in zero customers in a year. Measuring the false alert rate is also highly subjective. Companies tend to use a given scenario repeatedly to measure their results when, of course, this has little to no bearing on reality. Things like the weather (moving shadows affect certain algorithms even when accounted for algorithmically, headlights, flashlights, camera flashes change things, wind, rain, snow, bugs, everything you can imagine, lol...) negate all of these measurements.
It is nice to see new blood in this space, but I hope they were smart enough to make their software offerings totally distinct from their hardware (many companies do not) so that they can integrate with other systems without to much work. That's the best way to make money in the video analytics market right now. The big boys (like SIEMENS) got into the game about 3 years ago and they'll squeeze you out every time unless you can offer something that helps them land a big deal.