Ratchet Up

IBM Will Link Chicago Surveillance Cameras With Fiberoptics

IT World Security reports on a system by which IBM will link by fiber optics the thousands of surveillance cameras now installed in Chicago.

Operation Virtual Shield system is intended to give the city's emergency response coordination agency the ability to remotely keep track of emergencies in real time.

Now, with the help of IBM Corp., Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) is looking to expand the system's capabilities so that IBM's software can analyze the thousands of hours of video being recorded by Operation Virtual Shield.

“That's really going to just throw our camera network into hyperdrive,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman with the OEMC. “Ultimately I think what this software might be able to do is simply recognize suspicious behavior and alert our operations people and, at times, our crime detections specialists as to what it sees.”

The software could recognize a package that had been left in a public park or a car parked where no car is supposed to be, Smith said.

IBM has been pushing a similar technology called Smart Surveillance System within the retail industry as a tool to fight shoplifting. The Smart Surveillance System was spun out of IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center earlier this year.

Now IBM is talking to a number of cities about rolling out similar projects, according to Sam Docknevich, a Digital Video Surveillance National Practice Leader with IBM. However none is as advanced as the Operation Virtual Shield effort. “Chicago is definitely the leading example of the value of integrating video from multiple organizations and using it to enhance public safety,” he said.

OEMC's Smith would not say how much the city is spending on the project or when it expects IBM's video analytics capabilities to go live.

The trick will be to make the analytics software work in a useful way. “The challenge is going to be teaching computers to recognize the suspicious behavior,” said Smith. “Once this is done this will be a very impressive city in terms of public safety.”

Bouncy, Stealthy Camera Design Prototype

Here's a design prototype camera that's pointing in a playful new media photograhy direction: “The Tripos is a robust digital camera which allows the user to experience new perspectives and perceptions and takes the potential of digital photography to a new level. The camera is equipped with three protected fisheye lenses and allows for an active, spontaneous and playful photographing experience.

This product can take images while being thrown, suspended or just being placed in an unusual location. It captures the moment by responding to sound or movement, or by reacting to the manually operated release. Sequentially taken photographs are possible as well as 360 degree panorama images. All working parts are integrated in the robust casing and can be operated easily and intuitively.

Pictures can be wirelessly transmitted to a separate display unit for viewing. This unit functions as a processing and storage device and the camera’s charging station.” [Source: Yanko Design]

The Digital Smiley Is Having Its 25th Birthday Today!

Search Images In Hundreds Of Langauges

The old cliche is that images transcend language. True enough, until you want to search for them.

The University of Washington's Turing Center has just set up an image search site that can take or translate image search queries in hundreds of languages.

Smile Analysis - Possible Software For Your Camera?

The Omron Corporation unveiled smile recognition software that promises to improve the ability of machines to read human emotions. [...] The new “OKAO Vision Real-time Smile Measurement Technology” is designed to automatically identify faces in digital images and assign each corresponding smile a score of 0% to 100%. The system works by automatically fitting a 3D face model onto the subject’s face and analyzing a number of key points, such as the degree to which the eyes and mouth are open, the shape of wrinkles at the edges of the eyes and mouth, and changes in the position of facial features. The entire process, from the time an image is input until the time the smile score is output, takes 0.044 second (for a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 processor).

OKAO Vision can analyze multiple faces simultaneously as long as they are at least 60 pixels wide and facing the camera (tilted less than 30 degrees to either side and less than 15 degrees up or down), and the software does not require faces to be registered beforehand. OKAO Vision, which Omron says is more than 90% accurate, was developed by studying the facial expressions of 15,000 individuals ranging from infants to the elderly, from a variety of countries.

The 46-KB, Windows 2000/XP-compatible program can easily be incorporated into a variety of devices, say the developers, who hope to see it put to use in digital cameras designed to capture the perfect smile, or in robots that can recognize when humans are happy. Masato Kawade, OKAO project leader, says he hopes the technology “can contribute to the development of an ideal society where machines operate in harmony with human emotions.”

Omron plans to release the new OKAO Vision system later this year, making it the latest addition to a line of face recognition technology that boasts features such as the ability to determine a subject’s age, gender and line of sight. In the future, the company plans to shift the focus away from shiny, happy people and develop technology that can read faces for anger and sadness.“ [Source: Pink Tentacle]

Adobe Working On High Animation For The Masses

From Technology Review:

“Computer-generated effects are becoming increasingly more realistic on the big screen, but these animations generally take hours to render. Now, Adobe Systems, the company famous for tools like Photoshop and Acrobat Reader, is developing software that could bring the power of a Hollywood animation studio to the average computer and let users render high-quality graphics in real time. […]

Adobe is focusing its efforts on ray tracing, a rendering technique that considers the behavior of light as it bounces off objects. Since it takes so long to render, ray tracing is typically used for precomputed effects that are added to films, computer games, and even still pictures before they reach the consumer […] more consumers have machines with the capability to compute ray-tracing algorithms. […]

Ray tracing takes a fundamentally different approach from rasterization, explains Miller. ”Rather than converting each object into its pixel representation, it takes all of the geometry in the scene and stores it in a highly specialized database,“ he says. This database is designed around performing the following fundamental query: given a ray of light, what points on a surface does it collide with first? By following a ray of light as it bounces around an entire scene, designers can capture subtle lighting cues, such as the bending of light through water or glass, or the multiple reflections and shadows cast by shiny three-dimensional objects such as an engine or a car. […]

The current ray-tracing approach alone won’t solve all the problems that computer-graphics researchers are tackling, Hart adds. It’s still impossible to perfectly simulate the human face. ”This is an elusive goal,“ he says, ”because as we

Links, But Now Inside Video

Here's a new way to put links and info inside your video. They're calling it hypervideo linking. There are multiple ways to access the annotative content, but the central one seems to click on a “beacon” that highlights and object in the scene. Check out this two-minute video to see how it works. More from the company, Asterpix:

Hypervideo makes video an interactive experience by allowing viewers to:

* Get more information on objects of interest during video playback
* Navigate directly to specific scenes that contain objects of interest without having to watch the entire video

Asterpix enables users to easily create hypervideos and share them through websites, blogs, and email.

Hypervideo is comparable to hypertext in some respects. Hypertext makes text an interactive experience, allowing you to create and click on “hot” links to navigate a document. Hypertext has changed the way we navigate documents. For example, when we open a simple text document such as a printed book, we often look at the table of contents first and then turn to the page of interest. When we open a hypertext document, the table of contents typically comprises links to the appropriate portions of the document. Simply clicking on these links takes us to the relevant sections and subsections. Hypertext documents contain links to other hypertext documents allowing the reader to navigate large quantities of information quickly to gather what is of interest at that moment.

Analogous to hypertext, hypervideo makes video an interactive experience. Specifically, hypervideo allows users to create links from objects in a video, even as these objects move around in the scene. Viewers may then click on these “hotspot” links to navigate the video and get more information on objects of interest.“