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System Improves Automated Monitoring of Security Cameras


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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a system that can analyze several surveillance cameras more accurately and in less time than it would take a human operator.

The system, known as partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), uses mathematics to reach a compromise between accuracy and speed to enable security staff to act on an intrusion as quickly as possible. The system first conducts a learning phase, in which it assesses how each piece of software works in the type of setting in which it is being applied. The system then adds the information to its mathematical framework, which determines which of the available algorithms to run on the situation.

"We plug all of the things we have learned into the POMDP framework, and it comes up with a policy that might tell you to start out with a skin analysis, for example, and then depending what you find out you might run an analysis to try to figure out who the person is, or use a tracking system to figure out where they are [in each frame]," says MIT's Christopher Amato.

The system also can take context into account when analyzing a set of images.

From MIT News 
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc. External Link, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

 



 

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