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Posts with tag cctv

Security Cam Catches Thief, Thanks to Name and Birthdate Tattoo

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Oct 8th 2008 at 6:16PM

Thief Caught on Camera, Has Name and Birthday Tatooed on Neck

What kind of criminal gets his name and birth-date tattooed on his neck? The simple answer -- not a very bright one. Aaron Evans, a 21-year-old repeat offender with an extremely troubled background, was caught on film breaking into a vehicle setup by U.K. police in a parking lot to catch opportunistic thieves.

Evans smashed open the driver's side window of the car and stole a planted GPS device. Unfortunately, he didn't notice the closed circuit security camera (CCTV) on the passenger side of the car. The camera got a perfectly clear shot of the young man's identifying neck tattoo.

Since Evans isn't capable of reading and writing, we're wondering if he even knows what the markings on neck say. [From: Telegraph]

Britain's Surveillance Cameras Get Ears and Brains

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Jun 29th 2008 at 5:15PM

Britain's Surveillance Cameras Get Ears and BrainsIt was less than a year ago that closed circuit television (CCTV) security cameras in the UK were given the ability to hear. Now, in some places, those cameras are getting a major upgrade in the form of an artificial intelligence program that law enforcement officials hope will eventually be able to identify and locate specific sounds. The current generation of software is sophisticated enough for complex image recognition -- it can even identify if a car antenna is up or not.

The next step for the software is to learn to identify the waveforms of sounds, such as a car window being broken. The hope is that the camera will then be able to locate the sound, pivot to spot its origin, and alert the camera's operator. As the software "hears" more it will learn to identify more sounds.

Big Brother isn't just watching anymore, he's listening and learning. [Source: BBC]
Engadget

Los Angeles Traffic Cam Brings Live Gridlocks to Your Cellphone

by Darren Murph, posted Jun 29th 2008 at 4:08PM


We have all ideas (okay, so we know it for a fact) that the Los Angeles Traffic Cam was designed for those living in LA, but we can't help but imagine how drivers in less congested cities could use this to make their own daily commute not seem so bad.

NBC4 and 3rd Dimension have teamed up to beam out live video and nearly live still shots from some 270 LA-area traffic cameras to those with compatible mobiles, and being that it's ad-supported, the whole thing is completely free to end users. Of course, for all you know, they could just loop a clip of gridlocked traffic during rush hour and call it reality. Sadly, said idea would almost work. [Source: LATimes Blogs]
Engadget

Chicago's City-Wide Security Cameras to Be Monitored By Computers

by Nilay Patel, posted May 16th 2008 at 9:44AMBreaking News


Chicago residents are no strangers to the city's many CCTV cameras by this point -- if anyone knows exactly how long to stop at Roosevelt and State to avoid the red-light cam there, you let us know, okay? -- but it looks like this summer is going to bring a new twist to the city's surveillance racket: automated camera monitoring. Video from the several thousand cameras in Chicago's Operation Virtual Shield project currently comes into the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communication's ops center, but starting this summer, it'll also be watched by an IBM-developed autonomous system that can be programmed to watch for specific activities or objects, like certain cars or unattended backpacks. Since the video is stored on a 60 terabyte storage array for 30 days, law enforcement can also do retroactive searches using the tech. That's a huge step up from San Francisco's useless CCTV system, sure, but we've never really believed any of this stuff is actually effective at deterring crime -- hopefully we'll be proven wrong. Check out the the full news vid at the read link. [Source: ABC7 via Boing Boing]

Rock Band Films Latest Video With Security Cameras

by Blake Besharian, posted May 14th 2008 at 12:35PM

band uses cctv to film music video

The Get Out Clause -- an unsigned band from Manchester, England -- has used the eyes of the surveillance state to produce its own music video. While Britain currently has an estimated 13-million closed-circuit TV cameras (CCTV), the band only played to 80 of them around the city of Manchester. After playing its song for the CCTV cameras (and anyone else who happened to be around), the band requested the footage from the organizations that own the cameras, under the UK's Freedom of Information Act. While only about 20 of the locations eventually turned over the footage, they had more than enough footage to make a pretty solid music video.

"We wanted to produce something that looked good and that wasn't too expensive to do," guitarist Tony Churnside told Sky News.

Seems the Freedom of Information act could have saved Kevin Smith a bunch of money when he made 'Clerks.' We really wonder if this is the last time we'll see this tricky way of filming (actually, it's not, as Adam Rifkin's recent 'Look' proved). [Source: The Telegraph]




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