Public monitoring in the UK (work in progress)
Created | Updated Dec 5, 2003
Most of the British public do not realise the range of ways that we are monitored. This monitoring will only expand in its range and intrusiveness in the future. Some of these measures have been justified by recent terrorist attacks.
Traffic is monitored by speed cameras, advanced cameras that automatically recognize number plates (trialled in Project Laser in the West Midlands and Northamptonshire), used for congestion charging in London and for mobile car tax detector vans and CCTV.
Camera systems are being developed which will automatically recognize abnormal behaviour*. The processing of intelligience is the limiting factor in its application. The Echelon system is backed up by 14 acres of supercomputers at Fort Meade, Maryland. Even then the warnings of 9/11 were only registered the day after (allegedly!). In Australia cameras recognize faces by concentrating on certain measurements of the face which seem to be fairly reliable.
Future possibilities are the introduction of biometric details into passports to satisfy international requirements,
*Welcome to the world of cameras with built-in brains.
[...] The current system can also track multiple people as they enter a room, focus on their heads or faces and log information to generate statistics," says [Siemens Corporate Research's] Ramesh. It accomplishes this by using algorithms that detect people from visual information generated by omnidirectional, 360o-field-of-view sensors. It also uses auxiliary pan-tilt cameras to focus and zoom in on faces. "We see this as a step toward a new generation of intelligent sensors that perform autonomous vision tasks and report data such as shopping patterns in department stores or usage patterns in subway stations to a remote base station," explains Ramesh.
[...] So ten or twenty years from now, the camera on the shopping mall roof probably still won't have a clue as to why a man is walking from car to car in the parking lot, but it will most certainly be smart enough to ask a camera perched on the nearest lamp post to take a look, identify the potential culprit and check whether the license plate of the car he gets into is his.(from underreported.com)
Traffic is monitored by speed cameras, advanced cameras that automatically recognize number plates (trialled in Project Laser in the West Midlands and Northamptonshire), used for congestion charging in London and for mobile car tax detector vans and CCTV.
Camera systems are being developed which will automatically recognize abnormal behaviour*. The processing of intelligience is the limiting factor in its application. The Echelon system is backed up by 14 acres of supercomputers at Fort Meade, Maryland. Even then the warnings of 9/11 were only registered the day after (allegedly!). In Australia cameras recognize faces by concentrating on certain measurements of the face which seem to be fairly reliable.
Future possibilities are the introduction of biometric details into passports to satisfy international requirements,
*Welcome to the world of cameras with built-in brains.
[...] The current system can also track multiple people as they enter a room, focus on their heads or faces and log information to generate statistics," says [Siemens Corporate Research's] Ramesh. It accomplishes this by using algorithms that detect people from visual information generated by omnidirectional, 360o-field-of-view sensors. It also uses auxiliary pan-tilt cameras to focus and zoom in on faces. "We see this as a step toward a new generation of intelligent sensors that perform autonomous vision tasks and report data such as shopping patterns in department stores or usage patterns in subway stations to a remote base station," explains Ramesh.
[...] So ten or twenty years from now, the camera on the shopping mall roof probably still won't have a clue as to why a man is walking from car to car in the parking lot, but it will most certainly be smart enough to ask a camera perched on the nearest lamp post to take a look, identify the potential culprit and check whether the license plate of the car he gets into is his.(from underreported.com)
