Real Time Behavioural Recognition System To Launch

THE NEXT evolution in monitoring and to some extent controlling citizen behaviour in real time is about to hit the streets this Autumn in the form of a Behavioural Recognition System from a company called BRS Labs which is hoping to completely change the video security surveillance paradigm in the process.

Historically most CCTV and security monitoring systems are monitored by a human at some point. Picture the security officer planted in front of banks of monitors watching different aspects of a building for example. His role is to spot anything out of the ordinary and respond accordingly, however it’s a kind of needle in a haystack situation dependant upon how alert the security officer is and how many screens he is monitoring.

Now however BRS Labs is planning to launch a new solution which will analyze the video footage in real time and create a baseline of sorts and then, when any deviations are detected, it will send out an alert. To explain in more detail I’ll quote from an article published at darkreading.com:

BRS Labs, which is launching both its business and its technology today, has received 16 patents on a new video surveillance application that can convert video images into machine-readable language, and then analyze them for anomalies that suggest suspicious behavior in the camera’s field of view.

Unlike current video surveillance gear – which requires a human to monitor it or complex programming that can’t adapt to new images – BRS Labs’s software can “learn” the behavior of objects and images in a camera’s field of view. It can establish “norms” of activity for each camera, then alert security officers when the camera registers something abnormal in its field of view.

The BRS Labs software can establish a baseline in anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on how much activity the camera recognizes and how regular the patterns of behavior are. Once the software is operational, it can “recognize” up to 300 objects and establish a baseline of activity. If the camera is in a wooded area where few humans ever go, it will alert officers when it registers a human on the screen. If it is monitoring a high fence line, it will send an alert when someone jumps the fence.

There seems to be an acknowledgement that the system will normally create false positives too but BRS are estimating that the industry will accept up to 3 false alerts for every 1 real one. The system has been deployed to test sites and environments already according to this article from MarketWire:

Over the past eight months, BRS has conducted pilot deployments across a broad spectrum of security environments including a global energy company, a global financial services company, an undercover federal law enforcement operation, a classified nuclear facility, a high-threat-target government facility, and a professional sports stadium. The company is now undergoing final testing in preparation for its formal product launch in the Fall.

I have to admit that while the idea itself seems like a clever piece of technology, the applications for this continually bring us closer to the full monitoring of a Big Brother society and – putting my paranoid hat back on for a few seconds – it also brings us one step closer to handing over control to the machines.

I know the company are making much about how the security officers can be more effective when using this system because they can spend more time diagnosing issues and less time monitoring, but is the next logical step not to cut them out of the loop entirely and simply integrate the alerting system of the BRS solution with a response system of either emergency services or – at some distant point – an automated urban pacification unit?

Whether it’s phone tapping, cameras that can undress us or now video surveillance that analyzes behaviour, we just seem to be sleepwalking one step at a time to a completely monitored big brother existence.

Perhaps it won’t be long before we have machines monitoring other machines for any ‘deviations’ which then alert even more machines to respond accordingly… and we can all go holiday at the beach while they get on with everything else. Oh wait… we all know what happens then right?

I guess the rise of the machines continues unabated…