ISSUED BY: GCIS Communications Command Center
SOURCE: The Economist
05March2011 6:00amEST
GCIS INTELLIGENCE UPDATE: Video cameras are popping up everywhere. On a typical day out in a big city a person could be filmed by hundreds of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras. The combined output of all these systems is far greater than the capacity of security staff to watch all the images. So various ways are used to automate the process.
Now an image-processing technology developed by BriefCam, an Israeli company, makes looking through CCTV footage a breeze. In some cases, twenty-four hours of video from a security camera can be searched in under a minute. The process works by showing only the bits that move. It essentially creates a summary of all moving events and plays that back as a synopsis superimposed over the static background image.
So, a camera watching over a gate though which only a dozen people a day pass would appear to be a much busier gate, with a dozen people using it in only a few seconds. As the video is not speeded up, each person moves at their actual pace. And at any time during the review an operator can switch to see the original video footage. (read full report)
