Domestic Surveillance: stills from video

Dynamite Bob dbob at semtex.com
Tue Oct 9 17:08:24 PDT 2001


[Reformatted for legibility.  Please take the few moments required to
ensure materials submitted are readable.  KMSelf]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000080591oct09.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Da%5Fsection

Still images can be derived from many video frames
with better resolution than you think.





    BOSTON -- Like so many Americans, Steve Hill was appalled when he
    saw newspaper reprints of two World Trade Center terrorists as they
    passed through airport security the morning of Sept. 11.

    The sight of Mohamed Atta and Waleed M. Alshehri as captured on a
    video camera in Portland, Maine, was shocking enough. But Hill had
    another, deeply visceral reaction.

    "Professional pride," he explained. "I saw these rotten-looking
    images in the newspaper, and thought, 'We can do better.' " So he
    called the Boston FBI and offered to install--for free--his
    company's software that clarifies visual images.  Salient Stills is
    a small start-up, and when shareholders and directors winced at
    about $20,000 worth of corporate altruism, Hill reminded them that,
    since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans have opened their hearts and
    their pocketbooks. Hill figured Salient could at least pony up their
    pixels.

    "So many people in the country right now are feeling, 'I could go
    beat up those terrorists,' " Hill said. "It was sort of the same
    idea."

    The weapon the 10-person enterprise supplied the local FBI is a
    technique for clarifying moving images from videotape.  Reproduced
    as still photographs, video images tend to be grainy. Subtleties
    vanish. Facial features and details such as license plate imprints
    are hard to distinguish.

    "Many years ago"--in 1990, Laura Teodosio said--the challenge of
    transforming a moving medium into a still image with precise
    resolution became the subject of her master's thesis at MIT.
    Working at the university's famed Media Lab--where advanced
    technology finds practical applications--Teodosio developed a
    software system she called videoFOCUS. Its purpose was "temporal
    condensation," essentially squeezing a series of moving images into
    a legible print.

    Her signature effort was a glorious portrait of cellist Yo-Yo Ma,
    sawing away at a concert, yet absolutely still in Teodosio's
    finished image. She also produced a clear likeness of pitcher Roger
    Clemens with his legendary fastball streaming sequentially overhead.
    Neither endeavor seemed destined for widespread appreciation.

    "But as it turned out, there was a side effect," said Teodosio, 37.
    "We wound up getting video frames that were higher quality than the
    original."

    The 3-year-old company's name was taken from Teodosio's thesis,
    which posited that "you take the salient features from each frame"
    to create a more cohesive image.

    Newspapers were Salient's first target audience. Teodosio's product
    was born under the aegis of a group called "news and the future,"
    MIT techies seeking novel avenues to interact with news information.

    Though USA Today and the New York Times snapped up a Salient system
    that enhanced the translation of video images to still photos,
    others were uncomfortable because the process involves combining
    pixels--tiny dots that make up any image on film or videotape--from
    several sequential frames. The word "composite" strikes fear in the
    souls of media purists.

    But Salient CEO Hill, a 52-year-old former book publisher,
    persevered, noting that "every camera is moving, even if it is
    affixed to a tripod." His firm's technology--in use on a trial basis
    at the Los Angeles Times--captures common information from
    consecutive frames and "basically cleans up the dust," he said.

    From news environments Salient made an unexpected transition into
    the world of security, Hill said. Every day, he said, most Americans
    unknowingly are videotaped a dozen times or more. Video cameras whir
    at banks, rental car agencies, convenience stores and, of course,
    airports.

    But many mothers would not recognize their own children from the
    soupy images that result. The video cameras function mainly as
    deterrents, Hill said.

    Late in June, however, the video system in a Boston pharmacy
    recorded a prescription drug theft. The incident, one in a series of
    synthetic opiate robberies that have plagued the area in recent
    months, received wide attention. Hill contacted the Boston police
    and offered to help refine the blurry images of the man seen
    stealing OxyContin, a powerful painkiller.

    A spokesman for Police Commissioner Paul Evans confirmed that the
    department is using the Salient technology. Hill said his company
    also has sold the process to the Singapore defense force, and to the
    Carabinieri, Italy's paramilitary national police force.

    Boston FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz would not comment about
    whether the Salient technology is in use at headquarters here.

    But at Salient--a "little private company" valued at $12 million to
    $15 million--Hill said the decision to help what he playfully called
    "an unnamed federal agency" stemmed from President Bush's entreaty
    to all Americans to aid in the investigation of the attacks. That
    plea, Hill said, may have had special resonance in Boston, where
    terrorists boarded the two planes that crashed into the twin towers.

    "I definitely think we're feeling real guilt here," he said. "We let
    them through.  They were hanging around here. They figured it was
    easy pickings here, and they were right."

    The Portland airport security video is almost incidental to the
    investigation at this point, Hill said. Both terrorists are dead.

    "But they have a lot of different images of a lot of different
    things. There's a lot going on. I can say this: The federal agency
    is devoting an enormous amount of resources to this process."





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