From Ziencedaily

No Place to Hide: New 360-Degree Video Surveillance System Uses Image Stitching Technology That Is Perfectly Detailed Edge to Edge ScienceDaily (June 7, 2010)

Traditional surveillance cameras can be of great assistance to law enforcement officers for a range of scenarios -- canvassing a crowd for criminal activity, searching for who left a suitcase beneath a bench, or trying to pick out a suspect who has fled a crime scene and blended into a teeming throng in the subway.
But there are shortfalls. For starters, once they zoom in on a specific point of interest, they lose visual contact with the rest of the scene.

Now, a new video surveillance system currently being developed by the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) may soon give law enforcement an extra set of eyes. The Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance (or ISIS) takes new video camera and image-stitching technology and bolts it to a ceiling, mounts it on a roof, or fastens it to a truck-mounted telescoping mast.

Like a bug-eyed fisheye lens, ISIS sees v-e-r-y wide. But that's where the similarity ends. Whereas a typical fisheye lens distorts the image and can only provide limited resolution, video from ISIS is perfectly detailed, edge-to-edge. That's because the video is made from a series of individual cameras stitched into a single, live view -- like a high-res video quilt.

"Coverage this sweeping, with detail this fine, requires a very high pixel count," says program manager Dr. John Fortune, of S&T's Infrastructure and Geophysical Division, "ISIS has a resolution capability of 100 megapixels." That's as detailed as 50 full-HDTV movies playing at once, with optical detail to spare. You can zoom in close…and closer…without losing clarity.


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New surveillance camera system provides text feed June 3, 2010 by
Lin Edwards

Two major tasks of the I2T framework: (a) image parsing and (b) text description. Image credit: Benjamin Yao.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a prototype surveillance camera and computer system to analyze the camera images and deliver a text feed describing what the camera is seeing. The new system aims to make searching vast amounts of video much more efficient.

The system was developed by Professor Song-Chun Zhu and colleagues Haifeng Gong and Benjamin Yao, in collaboration with the company ObjectVideo, of Reston Virginia in the US. Dubbed I2T for Image to Text, the system runs video frames through a series of vision algorithms to produce a textual summary of the contents of the frames. The text can then be indexed and stored in a database that can be searched using a simple text search. The system has been successfully demonstrated on surveillance footage.

The I2T system draws on a database of over two million images containing identified objects in over 500 classifications. The database was collected by Zhu starting in 2005 in Ezhou, China, with support from the Chinese government, but is still not large enough to allow the system to assess a dynamic situation correctly.

The first process in I2T is an image parser that analyzes an image and removes the background and identifies the shapes in the picture. The second part of the process determines the meanings of the shapes by referring to the image database. Zhu said that once the image is parsed transcribing the results into natural language “is not too hard.”

Diagram of the I2T framework. Image credit: Benjamin Yao.

The system also uses algorithms describing the movement of objects from one frame to another and can generate text describing motions, such as “boat 3 approaches maritime marker at 40:01.” It can also sometimes match objects that have left and then re-entered a scene, and can describe events such as a car running a stop sign. Professor Zhu said at the moment almost all searches for images within video is done using surrounding text, but the new system directly generates text from the images. He also added that the existence of YouTube and other video collections, and the expanding use of surveillance cameras everywhere show that being unable to efficiently search video is a major problem.

The I2T system is not yet advanced enough to recognize a large number of images instantly and is not ready yet for commercialization, but the researchers say it is close and needs only “minor tweaks.” The scientists also say they may be able to feed the text into a vocal synthesizer to increase its usefulness.

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Innovations in satellite imaging, facial and movement recognition and GPS location systems, among many other forms of tech  including DNA barcoding, will converge to deem RFID an obsolete memory. The latest in nanotech imaging is documented in the story below.


FROM GIZMAG
Next-gen nanotech spy satellites will count the hairs on your head

Anyone who likes to get their gear off for a spot of naked sunbathing in the backyard may have to think twice in the future. Researchers have developed a new nanotechnology-based “microlens” that could lead to a new generation of ultra-powerful satellite cameras and night-vision devices. Thankfully, the new lens is used for infrared imaging, so the technology is more likely to be used for security and monitoring climate change and deforestation than spying on naturists boosting their vitamin D levels.

Developed by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the lens uses gold to boost the strength of infrared imaging. By leveraging the unique properties of nanoscale gold to “squeeze” light into tiny holes in the surface of the device, the researchers have doubled the detection cabability of a quantum dot-based infrared detector. With some refinements, the researchers expect this new technology should be able to enhance this by up to 20 times.

According to project leader Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer, the breakthrough is the first in more than a decade to demonstrate success in enhancing the signal of an infrared detector without also increasing the noise.

“Infrared detection is a big priority right now, as more effective infrared satellite imaging technology holds the potential to benefit everything from homeland security to monitoring climate change and deforestation,” said Lin.

“We have shown that you can use nanoscopic gold to focus the light entering an infrared detector, which in turn enhances the absorption of photons and also enhances the capacity of the embedded quantum dots to convert those photons into electrons. This kind of behavior has never been seen before,” he said.

The detectivity of an infrared photodetector is determined by how much signal it receives, divided by the noise it receives. The current state-of-the art in photodetectors is based on mercury-cadmium-telluride (MCT) technology, which has a strong signal but faces several challenges including long exposure times for low-signal imaging. Lin said his new study creates a roadmap for developing quantum dot infrared photodetectors (QDIP) that can outperform MCTs, and bridge the innovation gap that has stunted the progress of infrared technology over the past decade.

The surface plasmon QDIPs are long, flat structures with countless tiny holes on the surface. The solid surface of the structure that Lin built is covered with about 50 nanometers – or 50 billionths of a meter – of gold. Each hole is about 1.6 microns – or 1.6 millionths of a meter – in diameter, and 1 micron deep. The holes are filled with quantum dots, which are nanoscale crystals with unique optical and semiconductor properties.

The interesting properties of the QDIP’s gold surface help to focus incoming light directly into the microscale holes and effectively concentrate that light in the pool of quantum dots. This concentration strengthens the interaction between the trapped light and the quantum dots, and in turn strengthens the dots’ ability to convert those photons into electrons. The end result is that Lin’s device creates an electric field up to 400 percent stronger than the raw energy that enters the QDIP.


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