Smile! Aerial images being used to enforce laws


RIVERHEAD, N.Y. – On New York's Long Island, it's used to prevent drownings. In Greece, it's a tool to help solve a financial crisis. Municipalities update property assessment rolls and other government data with it. Some in law enforcement use it to supplement reconnaissance of crime suspects.

High-tech eyes in the sky — from satellite imagery to sophisticated aerial photography that maps entire communities — are being employed in creative new ways by government officials, a trend that civil libertarians and others fear are eroding privacy rights.

"As technology advances, we have to revisit questions about what is and what is not private information," said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology.

Online services like Google and Bing give users very detailed images of practically any location on the planet. Though some images are months old, they make it possible for someone sitting in a living room in Brooklyn to look in on folks in Dublin or Prague, or even down the street in Flatbush.

Sean Walter, an attorney and first-term town supervisor in Riverhead, N.Y., insists he is a staunch defender of privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

But Walter supported using Google Earth images to help identify about 250 Riverhead homes where residents failed to get building permits certifying their swimming pools complied with safety regulations. All but about 10 eventually came to town hall.

Walter said the focus was safety, not filling town coffers with permit money, which averaged about $150 depending on the size of the pool. A 4-foot fence is required, gates have to be self-closing and padlocked. All pools must have an alarm that sounds when sensors are activated indicating someone is in the pool.

"We have a town employee who is a personal friend of mine whose son was found face-down in a swimming pool," Walter said. "He's OK, but I don't want to be the supervisor that attends the funeral of a child that drowns in a swimming pool."

Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., fears that while Walter's focus was safety, other municipalities may use the images to check for other transgressions.

"It's only a matter of time," Coney said. "There are lots of ordinances where this can be used. In California, where they deal with brush fires, could a satellite image show if a homeowner has brush growing too close to his home? What if someone has junk cars on their lot in violation of ordinances?"

Riverhead resident Tony Villar said the town's action "could be considered Big Brother looking down at you."

"But at the same time, if the government can listen to your telephone conversations in the name of terrorism," he said.

Standing outside the Riverhead Public Library, Walter Casey of Flanders agreed. "I think it's a great intrusion on people's privacy; they should use it on the politicians' backyards."

The New York Civil Liberties Union's Donna Lieberman said there are ways to enforce requirements "without this sort of engaging in Big Brother on high. Technically, it may be lawful, but in the gut it does not feel like a free society kind of operation."

In Greece, officials are struggling with a debt crisis and have sought to catch tax-evaders by using satellite photos to spot undeclared swimming pools — indicators of taxable wealth.

Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said in a statement that Google Earth acquires its information from a broad range of commercial and public sources.

"The same information is available to anyone who buys it from these widely available public sources," she said. "Google's freely available technology has been used for a variety of purposes, ranging from travel planning to scientific research to emergency response, rescue and relief in natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake."

At least nine lawsuits seeking class-action status have been filed in the United States, contending that Google collected fragments of e-mails, Web-surfing data and other information from unencrypted wireless networks as it photographed neighborhoods for its "Street View" feature. Google is also facing investigations or inquiries in 38 states as well as in several countries, including Germany, Spain and Australia.

The Mountain View, Calif., company said in May it had inadvertently collected the data from public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries, but maintains it never used the data and hasn't broken any laws.

Google Earth posts updates about every two weeks on selected images from its providers, with images ranging from a few weeks to a few years old.

For big cities like Chicago, tracking illegal pools, porches and decks through Google Earth requires frequent imaging updates, so the Chicago buildings department uses it as a reference tool on a case-by-case scenario, said spokesman Bill McCaffrey.

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FROM FAST COMPANY

A pair of researchers from the London School of Economics' Department of Geography & Environment are measuring happiness throughout the U.K. And to do it, they've created an iPhone app called Mappiness. Although, on the surface, it doesn't seem to be that new a concept--remember Harvard student Matt Killingworth's Track Your Happiness app from last year?--this year's U.K.-centric model wants to discover just how much a person's environment affects his or her wellbeing.

The project launched yesterday, following a week-long pilot to check the tech, and currently has over 1,600 participants. Once signed up, the app pings users on their iPhone once a day or more, asking them to key in just how happy, relaced and awake they feel, using the app's sliding scale, and finds out what they are doing, who they are with, and where they are--photo optional. As well as human input, the app measures location using the phone's GPS and noise levels via the microphone.


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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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