[Infowarrior] - IBM researchers take on video surveillance privacy

[Richard Forno]

IBM researchers take on video surveillance privacy
http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070316/tc_infoworld/86924

James Niccolai 2 hours, 1 minute ago

San Francisco (IDGNS) - Researchers at IBM Corp. are trying to address
privacy concerns about video surveillance systems, part of a broader effort
by IBM to build a new business in the fast-growing surveillance market.

Concerns about security in cities, airports and other public places are
causing a proliferation of video surveillance systems, but the increase has
heightened concerns about privacy among regulators and the general public.

IBM hopes to alleviate the concerns with technology that can pick out faces
in a video frame and automatically blur them, so that people's images -- and
therefore their movements -- are not recorded, said Joachim Stark, director
of digital video surveillance with IBM's global services group.

An obvious hurdle is identifying the potential suspects from innocent
bystanders. Investigators often review closed-circuit video footage after a
crime is committed, and blurring faces would defeat much of the point of
doing surveillance.

One solution is to find ways to identify suspects automatically so that only
their faces are left unblurred. Video analytics software can already trigger
an alert when a person leaves an object of a certain size on a station
platform, for example, and walks off. After spotting such a behavior, a
surveillance system could "rewind" the action in Tivo-like fashion and
unblur a suspect's face from the moment the person enters the frame, Stark
said.

Another option is to blur all the faces when the video is recorded, but
allow investigators with the right access permissions to unmask them at a
later date.

None of the solutions are perfect, and Stark said it's likely to be a few
years before the blurring technology, being developed at IBM's T.J. Watson
Research Center in New York, is ready for commercial use. Another hurdle is
being able to identify and blur faces in real time. A prototype was
demonstrated at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.

In the meantime IBM has an array of software and services to pursue its
video surveillance push, which began late last year and is aimed at the
retail, banking and public sectors. It calls the products its Smart
Surveillance System. It's a newcomer to the market, and will compete with
established players like Vidient Inc., ObjectVideo Inc., and others.

The video surveillance market is growing at around 15 percent annually,
Stark said. IBM hopes to distinguish itself with its database and middleware
technologies, which can help store and analyze the vast quantities of video
data.

Surveillance technologies have already come a long way. IBM's analytics
software records metadata, or information about the data in a video, such as
colors and the size of objects in a frame. If a witness reports seeing some
on a red sweater acting suspiciously, investigators can search for "red" in
the surveillance software and pull up the relevant images.

Such systems can generate vast amounts of data, however, and IBM is looking
at compression technologies to reduce the volume.