Smart Software Gives Surveillance Eyes A 'Brain'

By Roland Piquepaille

Surveillance cameras are everywhere these days, from airports to banks and from stores to parking lots. But until now, their images needed to be viewed by humans. Not anymore. Computer scientists from the University of Rochester have developed a software which gives these cameras a rudimentary brain to keep an eye out for us. But it's not an electronic 'Big Brother.' It will be trained to find guns in airports, but it also will be able to help people to find their car keys or their reading glasses.

"Compared to paying a human, computer time is cheap and getting cheaper," says Randal Nelson, associate professor of computer science and creator of the software 'brain.' "If we can get intelligent machines to stand in for people in observation tasks, we can achieve knowledge about our environment that would otherwise be unaffordable."

OK, how does this 'smart software' work?

Though a six-month-old baby can distinguish different objects from different angles, getting a computer to do it is a Herculean task of processing, and more complicated still is identifying a simple object in a complicated natural setting like a room bustling with activity.

Unlike the baby, the software needs to be told a lot about an object before it's able to discern it. Depending on how complex an object is, the software may need anywhere from one to 100 photos of the object from different angles. Something very simple, like a piece of paper, can be "grasped" by the program with a single picture; a soda can may take half a dozen, while a complex object like an ornate lamp may need many photographs taken from different angles to capture all its facets. With those images in mind, the software matches the new object it sees with its database of object to determine what the new object is.

Companies involved in security seem interested.

The technology for this 'smart camera' has already been licensed to the local company PL E-Communications, LLC, which has plans to develop the technology to control video cameras for security applications. For instance, CEO Paul Simpson is looking into using linked cameras covering a wide area to exchange information about certain objects, be they suspicious packages in an airport or a suspicious truck driving through a city under military control. Even unmanned aerial reconnaissance drones like the Predator that made headlines during the current Iraqi war can use the technology to keep an eye on an area for days at a time, noting when and where objects move.

For more information about Randal Nelson works in this area, you can take a look at his Object Recognition Research page.

And keep in mind this is not completely brand new technology. Check for example this prebious column from March 2003, "Recent Advances in Computer Vision."

Source: University of Rochester press release, February 12, 2004