[TGE-mail] Tgena Digest, Vol 27, Issue 28

Thu Oct 25 12:02:25 CDT 2007

There is a Video Analytics firm in St. Louis.

  This firm is Cernium Corp.    www.cernium.com.

  None of these systems are cheap...however, they are inexpensive when you think about what you are protecting.

  Ironically enough the cost of this system could be spread over a multi-block area.

  I know that several commercial districts are reviewing plans and make a decision to install a system.

  btw...I know this Perceptrak system.  I am the Quality Assurance Manager at Cernium and Perceptrak is one of my products for which I am responsible.  

  Bill Byrd
  Benton Park West.

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Today's Topics:

1. Rehabbers Club class tonight (lynn at peoplescoffee.com)
2. "smart" video offers an alert to threats (Kevin Liddy)

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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:44:16 -0700
From: lynn at peoplescoffee.com
Subject: [TGE-mail] Rehabbers Club class tonight
To: tgena at lists.more.net
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<20071024094415.54d03ce4005b1e8904c2b9254f620d88.349672d609.wbe at email.secureserver.net>

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Message: 2
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:43:17 -0400
From: Kevin Liddy 
Subject: [TGE-mail] "smart" video offers an alert to threats
To: tgena at lists.more.net
Cc: tgena-bounces at lists.more.net
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Something that the residents, police and alderman should talk about to
decrease the likelihood of crime in the neighborhood.

Kevin Liddy

`Smart' video offers an alert to threats - ; Taking boredom factor out of 
security systems 
Hiawatha Bray 
Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff. Boston Globe 
1,188 words 
22 October 2007 
The Boston Globe 
3 
D.1 
English 
? 2007 New York Times Company. Provided by ProQuest Information and 
Learning. All Rights Reserved. 

In video surveillance systems, the weakest link is the often bored, 
distracted human who has to spend hours staring at a bank of video 
monitors, waiting for something suspicious to happen. 

Several Boston area companies say they have found a solution: surveillance 
systems smart enough to recognize threats, even when their human operators 
do not. 

"It essentially replaces the need for people to watch video," said Scott 
Schnell, chief executive of VideoIQ Inc., a Bedford firm that was spun off 
earlier this year from General Electric Co. 

VideoIQ is one of several local companies vying for dominance of the 
market for "video analytics" systems, which can help defeat a variety of 
security threats, from shoplifters to suicide bombers. 

Systems from VideoIQ and Intuvision Inc. of Woburn can automatically spot 
an intruder climbing a fence or a subway passenger leaving a suspicious 
parcel on the platform. IntelliVid Inc. of Cambridge makes systems for 
retailers that can detect a possible shoplifter and electronically track 
his movement through the store, to see if he swipes anything else. 

"It's really started to take off in the last two to three years," said 
Simon Harris, research director for security markets at IMS Research Ltd., 
a British technology research firm. Harris said that worldwide sales of 
smart video surveillance systems will be less than $100 million this year, 
but rise to about $3 billion by 2010. 

Already there are more than 26 million surveillance cameras in the United 
States alone, according to a 2006 report from IBM Corp. 

The research firm iSuppli Corp. said that worldwide sales of surveillance 
systems will climb from 30 million units in 2006 to 66 million in 2011. 
But these are mostly systems that require constant human supervision. 
There are not enough workers to watch so many million video streams. Even 
if there were, people make mistakes, perhaps fatal ones. 

Computers that can recognize suspicious activities can serve as valuable 
backups to the human eyeball. The smart video systems are programmed to 
recognize certain shapes, like cars, people, or luggage. They're also 
designed to learn as they go, in the same fashion software can improve its 
recognition of human speech. The longer it runs, the better it gets at 
spotting anomalies. 

In addition, the systems allow security managers to draw digital 
boundaries at key points. They can tell the software to ignore people 
walking past a building, but issue an alert when someone walks toward the 
front door. 

The systems identify suspicious objects or movements by surrounding them 
with a box. For instance, the VideoIQ system puts a yellow box around 
moving objects that seem problematic, then uses its programming and 
experience to decide if it is a threat. 

One test video shows ducks and boats on the Hudson River. The system draws 
yellow boxes around the harmless ducks, but when a boat appears, the box 
turns bright red. The computer does not dial 911; instead it sends an 
electronic alert to the video monitoring center, where a handful of people 
may be tending hundreds of monitors. The smart video system directs them 
to the suspicious video feed and can replay the event that set off the 
alarm. It's up to the humans to decide what to do about it. 

Sadiye Guler, chief executive of Intuvision Inc., a video analytics firm 
in Woburn, admitted that computers still lag far behind humans at 
recognizing images. "It's still not as good as a 3- year-old child," she 
said. That's one reason humans are still needed to make the final call on 
a suspicious image. 

Intuvision, a startup funded by grants from the US intelligence community, 
has attacked the problem using a technique called "task- based attention." 
This method teaches the machine to give maximum attention to certain 
events and much less attention to others. Just as a speech recognition 
program listens to samples of a person's voice to improve its accuracy, 
the Intuvision system views many images of people and objects and learns 
to identify them based on shape and size criteria. 

A camera guarding a subway platform pays little attention to backpacks and 
suitcases that are moving. But it locks in on a package that has remained 
stationary for more than a minute or two, a package that might have been 
left behind by a would-be bomber. 

"It does a shape analysis," Guler said. "Bag and person sizes are 
different. The shapes are different." 

Intuvision's product is not yet on the market, but the company is 
deploying its first pilot system in the Washington, D.C., area. Guler 
won't identify the user. "I can tell that it is a federal law enforcement 
agency," she said. 

While VideoIQ and Intuvision try to tap the homeland security market, 
IntelliVid Corp. of Cambridge has a different focus. 

"We're really the only video-analytics-based company that specializes 
exclusively in retail," said IntelliVid chief executive Patrick 
Sobalvarro. 

It's a massive market opportunity, given the scale of the retail- theft 
problem. "There's about $37 billion of this stuff leaving stores every 
year," with about half being stolen by store employees, Sobalvarro said. 

IntelliVid technology isn't good enough to notice thefts of individual 
items. But if a sizable number of objects - say, razor blades - disappears 
from a shelf, the analytic software makes a note of it. The company's 
patented customer-tracking technology can see which visitor to the store 
removed so many razors. It can then track that shopper through every 
aisle, handing him off from one security camera to the next and looking to 
see what else he picks up. 

Of course, the system also notes whether the customer heads for the 
checkout counter or straight to the door. If he tries to leave without 
paying, the systems sends an electronic alert to security workers. 

A basic IntelliVid system for a small retailer costs about $10,000. It 
gets more complex and costly for bigger stores, which can have as many as 
250 surveillance cameras per location. Sobalvarro won't identify his 
customers, but said that about a dozen of the nation's biggest retailers 
use IntelliVid systems. 

Today's video analytics systems are designed to work with the millions of 
video cameras already deployed. But a new generation of smart cameras will 
make the systems more powerful and versatile. 

"The trend really is to put the intelligence in the camera," by adding a 
built-in digital signal processor chip to analyze the video, said Harris 
of IMS Research. 

Such systems could be cheaper than today's video analytics gear, because 
they won't need a separate server computer to collect and process the 
images. Instead, each camera in the network can be programmed to guard 
against different threats, because each will have a mind of its own. 

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray at globe.com. 

Caption: The Intuvision system monitors video streams and learns to 
identify people and objects based on shape and size. 

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Philadelphia is getting 250 new security cameras. 

Deputy Police Commissioner Jack Gaittens says the first of the new cameras 
will go up in the area of 52nd and Market streets in West Philadelphia. 

That neighborhood has been plagued by violence for years. 

Gaittens says the camera equipment will be able to receive signals from a 
two-mile radius, so police won't be looking only at one intersection. 

The first of the cameras should be in operation within about two weeks, as 
a result of a nearly $9 million deal between the city and Unisys. 

Authorities hope to expand beyond the 250 cameras in the future. 

------ 

Information from: Tony Hanson/KYW-AM, http://www.kyw1060.com 

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