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November 17, 2006

Smart Security

Very interesting article in Information Week: As Surveillance Video Gets Smarter, It'll Know When To Be Suspicious

This is a very interesting advancement in security and computing. Between video and networking, it's very easy to gather tons of video information. The hard part is sifting through all of that data to find the significant information. Video has mostly been used after the fact to document what happened and perhaps help to eventually identify criminals. But it has been totally useless in real-time.

Computers can process and compute data faster than humans. But only humans can think and recognize images. At some point, there has to be a human involved. But advancements in computing can help sift through at least most of the chaff to narrow down the task to a somewhat managable process. However, it's still a long way off from being helpful or reliable.

The line I found most interesting in the article was: "We capture the event of entering the building and feed that event to correlate with your identity in the system. ... If a worker who's already badged into the building tries to access the network remotely, the system will raise red flags." Sounds like an access list I know... (internal IP addresses shouldn't be entering the network from the Internet side of a router) Although it deals with badge swipe identification rather than image identification, it's nice to know that this idea is being used/implemented.

Posted by BlueWolf on November 17, 2006 12:43 PM