surveillance

Professor Mark Nixon of the University of Southampton is leading a research project on gait analysis. A tunnel with four cameras on each side records the 3D motion of a person walking through the tunnel. On future traverals of the tunnel, a person's gait can be compared with the recorded representation. The tunnel's background consists of colored squares to aid the analysis. More information is available in a janes.com article.

According to an nbcsandiego.com report, the U.S. government is reconsidering its virtual border fence project. The project's original goal was to establish a virtual fence on 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border with cameras and other sensors to detect illegal crossings. According to the article, a smaller scale system has been successfully established for a single town in Texas.

Dr. Shaogang Gong at the Queen Mary University of London is leading an international team of researchers to develop Samurai, an intelligent video surveillance system. The system profiles people behavior and learns probable routes that people might take. Using footage from Heathrow International Airport, the researchers show how the system can recognize potential threats that human operators may have missed. More information is available at a New Scientist article.

Stretch Inc. announced that it has received $10 million in additional mezzanine funding. The company makes software configurable processors for security cameras, and according to the press release, their customers include Skyvision, EverFocus, Lanner, Advantech, Euresys, Matrox, Provideo, and UDP Technologies.

According to Reuters, a Harris poll found that 96% of 2,416 adults in the United States supported the use of government video surveillance against terrorism, and about half supported the use of Federal stimulus funds for video surveillance against crime. The article discusses the need for automated computer vision methods to make effective use of video surveillance, and refers to the AISight product from BRS Labs. (See previous posting on BRS Labs on Computer Vision Central).

Vitamin D is a startup founded by former designers and developers of the PalmPilot and the Treo. The company is developing a video analytics and monitoring solution and expects to release a beta version this fall. A demo video shows the expected capabilities, and an article appears in ReadWrite.

In a press release, BRS Labs announced that it has won the top prize in the ASIS International ASIS Accolades program. BRS Labs is known for its video behavioral-analytics expertise. The prize was awarded to its adaptive learning technology (AISight™). ASIS International is an organization for security professionals founded in 1955 focused on developing education programs that address security topics.

Professor Michael J. Black and his students in a graduate computer vision class at Brown University assisted a police department in asking for leads in a homicide case. Harry T. Phillips Jr., 39, was killed in 2005 in a convenience store in Henrico County, Virginia, USA. The students sharpened surveillance camera images, which were released to the public by the Police Department in the hope of getting new information about the crime.

Cernium recently announced that it is deploying a video analytics system for Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. The Cernium system, Perceptrak, is a server-based architecture that will assist security personnel to monitor surveillance cameras in the Baltimore, MD campus. The system is also being deployed on healthcare and university campuses nationwide. More information is available in a press release and a local news video.

New digital traffic cameras are being installed in Victoria, Australia. According to a Traffic Technology Today news article, some cameras are replacing film cameras while others are installed in new locations to catch motorists who speed or run red lights. In a related news item on Australian traffic cameras, operators of speed cameras are being attacked by motorists, including incidents of rocks thrown at the operators.