Eyeball spy turns the tables on Big Brother

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227035.500-eyeball-spy-turns-the-tables-on-big-brother.html 

 Eyeball spy turns the tables on Big Brother

    * 14 April 2009 by Paul Marks

A gaze-tracking camera system analyses the gaze of CCTV operators as they
work to highlight any neglected screens (Image: fishmonk, stock.xchng)

Editorial: Who watches the watchers?

AN ORWELLIAN nightmare it may be to many of us, but CCTV is a boat full of
holes to the organisations that pay for it. That's because the people
watching CCTV images back in the control rooms often have too many screens to
monitor at once, and so may miss the criminal or antisocial activities they
are there to spot.

To the rescue of Big Brother's limited attention capabilities come Ulas Vural
and Yusuf Akgul of the Gebze Institute of Technology in Turkey, who have
developed a gaze-tracking camera system that watches the eyeballs of CCTV
operators as they work. It then automatically produces a summary of the CCTV
video sequences they have missed during their shift. "This increases the
reliability of the surveillance system by giving a second chance to the
operator," the researchers write in the journal Pattern Recognition Letters
(DOI: 10.1016/j.patrec.2009.03.002).

The system uses webcam-style cameras trained on the irises of the CCTV
operators. From this, software works out where the operators are looking as
they stare at each monitor - and the areas they have not been paying
attention to. From this it creates a video of what they missed, for them and
their bosses to watch at the end of their shift.

To make sure the summary can be watched as quickly as possible, Vural and
Akgul have developed an algorithm that discards frames that show only the
background with no people or moving vehicles in them, to leave only a few key
frames for each scene of interest. Vural says the system runs on a standard
PC and processes the images in real time, so the summary frames are ready to
browse, like a fast-motion flip book, at the end of the shift.

Privacy campaigners may enjoy the irony if the gaze-tracking system comes to
be regarded as intrusive by CCTV operators - who could fear that employers
will use it to dispense with their services if they consistently miss too
much on-screen skulduggery.  The gaze-tracking system may well be regarded as
intrusive by CCTV control-room staff

Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, a smart software company based in
the UK that has created its own CCTV analysis algorithms, points out that
gaze does not prove that an operator is registering the action. "They may be
looking but not seeing," he says.