It
seems there's a race on for total surveillance
Enemy
at the gait: New cameras identify you by your walk
A
new biometric “gait recognition” system has been developed by
Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, meaning that individuals
can now be recognized and located by their “signature” walk.
RT,
21
September, 2012
Serious
privacy concerns have been aired about the system and its potential
surveillance applications.
New
Scientist reports that NPL, which collaborated with the Center for
Advanced Software Technology (CAST), the BBC and BAE Systems,
developed a new system through which a person’s walk could be
identified. The tracking system combines a computer model of the NPL
building with feeds from each on-site CCTV camera.
In
each video frame, the system separates an individual’s silhouette
from its background. The rise and fall of head height is recorded,
and the pattern it forms can be represented by a set of numbers. This
is linked to the person’s identity. A computer can then produce a
list of all the other places that the person has visited, and the
occasions they have been there.
Iris
scans and facial recognition systems are seen as insufficient when it
comes to identifying individuals from a longer distance. These
methods require a “cooperative subject” and high-quality imaging.
Standard CCTV is too low-resolution to pick out distinctive features,
but the gait-identifying development could give it much more advanced
surveillance capabilities.
“This
technology poses a real threat to privacy and in the coming years it
will be used for marketing purposes as well as supposed public
safety. Personal data goes far beyond writing down your name and
address now and the law urgently needs revising to reflect this,”
Nick Pickles, director of the UK’s Big Brother Watch told RT.
Simultaneous
research has been carried out by Professor Martin Hofmann and
colleagues at the Technical University of Munich. They have developed
an even more intrusive version that takes information from a person's
image, such as shadows on their clothing, creating a considerably
more detailed “signature”.
Additionally,
Professor Daigo Muramatsu and colleagues at Osaka University have
been conducting research on how people can be identified from
different camera angles. He believes the research could also have
“commercial applications,” according to New Scientist.
Hoffman
suggested that it could be used to identify bank robbers who had
their faces covered.
However,
Nick Pickles stated, “Rather than finding new ways to identify
innocent people, we should be asking why mass surveillance has failed
to make people any safer.”
Earlier
this month RT reported the FBI’s installation of the $1-billion
Next Generation Identification system, which is able to recognize
faces, across America. This is an “upgrade” to the current
Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, and already
has incredible surveillance capabilities over the innocent as well as
guilty
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