Domestic Surveillance: stills from video
Dynamite Bob
dbob at semtex.com
Tue Oct 9 16:37:41 PDT 2001
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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