New Security System Interprets Guard Dog Barking
by Will Safer, posted May 22nd 2008 at 11:00AM
When a dog barks, do you know what it is saying – or at least trying to say?A system designed by an Israeli tech firm is being employed by the Israel Prison Service to help guards understand when a guard dog's barking is "normal" and when the dog is stressed, which could mean that a dangerous situation is developing.
Guard dogs are often able to sense a developing situation well before people or automated systems recognize danger – but human guards often don't hear the dogs or ignore the barking until it is too late.
Watch a video demonstration here.
That's why the developers at Bio-Sense, a high-tech company near Tel Aviv, created the program to interpret dog barks. They recorded thousands of dog barks from a variety of situations, from playtime to cat encounters to real emergencies. They then analyzed the barking to differentiate between normal and emergency situations. Now they claim the system identifies when a dog senses a problem and when it is just, ahem, crying wolf.
This goes well beyond the the LED light that purportedly interprets what a dog's wagging tail means, although a group of Hungarian scientists have developed a fairly complex program to interpret the language of the Mudi herding breed. The Hungarian system does not appear to be used by anyone yet for practical purposes.
The system from Bio-Sense, however, is in place with more than 100 clients in Israel, from prisons that want to prevent jail breaks to farmers who are trying to prevent theft. [Source: USA Today.]
