Smart Video Surveillance
The Journal News has conducted an interview with Arun Hampapur manager of IBM's Exploratory Computer Vision Group. The focus is mainly on how the 9/11/2001 attacks changed their research focus in computer vision.
From the Interview:
"Q:How did 9/11 affect your field?An overview (PDF) of this work has been published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.
A:Pre-9/11, the success stories in computer vision were around machine vision: How you inspect a printed circuit board while it is being manufactured. Now the biggest application of computer vision would be security. And there are two pieces to that security puzzle. Biometrics is answering the question, 'Who is this person?' Surveillance is answering the question, 'What is going on?'
Q:How does it work?
A:You can apply two kinds of functionality. One I called real-time alerts. You have a port and you have a fence, you don't want anyone jumping the fence. Or you have a retail store with a loading dock, and you don't want anyone on the loading dock past 9 o'clock. These are known conditions, for which you can say, 'OK, so if someone shows up on the loading dock after 9, tell me.'The second is being able to find things. Security is a kind of a cat-mouse game. Sometimes something becomes relevant only after the fact. If you remember the Washington sniper incident, somebody said there was a white van at the first scene, and then the police spent a lot of energy trying to look for the white van. There was no technology at that time which could use cameras to find white vans."
