You’re Being Watched: Surveillance Systems Get Smart

Video, video everywhere, and not enough people to watch it. That’s the conundrum facing military and security personnel today, the people who sit in front of banks of monitors, watching hours of mind-numbingly mundane footage of people going about their business, yet must be attuned to any slight clues to a wanted suspect or potential crime.

But now, researchers at MIT and the University of Minnesota have created a new program to discern such signals from the video noise faster and more accurately than a human or existing automated system.

It’s a new type of smart surveillance system that “learns” from previously recorded video footage how to quickly scan realtime feeds and identify specific suspects. It can also flag unusual, potentially dangerous changes in an environment like an airport, such as when someone deliberately leaves behind a bag.

“The learning phase is very fast, not requiring more than a minute for the problems we explored,” wrote Christopher Amato, the leader of the effort and a postdoctoral candidate with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

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