Video surveillance is increasingly common in America and other parts of the world. While cameras may be monitored in real time, they generally record video which can be reviewed later. This article covers two issues relating to video surveillance: privacy and retrieval.

The fact that cameras can monitor and record the actions of law-abiding people, in public, raises privacy concerns. To protect privacy IBM wants to blur the faces of ‘innocent bystanders’ [1].  The challenge is incorporating this into a product whose primary purpose is recording details of people suspected of wrongdoing. The two possibilies discussed in the article are 1) to automatically identify suspicious behavior and retain intact video only in those cases or 2) to store both the degraded and intact video and have separate access controls during retrieval.

The second part of the article discusses the information retrieval capabilities of current systems. These systems can automatically add metadata to the recorded video. During indexing, the system adds tags describing the colors and size of objects in the scene. Few details are provided about how queries are handled. The one example given is investigators, looking for a suspect wearing red, searching for the word “Red” to retrieve all video containing that color. 

Lecture:

  MULTIMEDIA IR
  METADATA FOR MULTIMEDIA

[1] Google recently began blurring faces in Street View:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9943140-7.html 

Reuters Mon Apr 21, 2008 10:00pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS28851+22-Apr-2008+BW20080422

NTT’s content recognition engine will be deployed in the U.S. for the first time combined with BayTSP’s Content Authentication Platform to enable content owners to monitor and manage how their intellectual property is used online.

The combination of NTT and BayTSP’s technologies will allow content owners to use proven video and audio fingerprinting technologies to monitor and manage how their intellectual property is used online, primarily on user-generated content sites like YouTube, Daily Motion, Google Video and Yahoo Video.

NTT has been researching and developing media search based on proprietary audio and video fingerprinting technologies since 1996.  The newly announced field trial in collaboration with BayTSP is the first application of NTT’s most advanced third generation robust media search technology to Internet content authentication applications on a large scale, and the first deployment of NTT’s Robust Media Search systems in the United States.
Relevant lecture:

8 CLASSIFICATION

16 CONETENT MANAGEMENT

18 METADATA FOR MULTIMEDIA

27 MULTIMEDIA IR