New Security Cameras to Detect Violent Motions

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A special CCTV camera might know what you are doing, thanks to a monitoring system that can detect aggressive behavior.

According to New Scientist, Kintense, which is based on Microsoft’s, gaming sensor Kinect, analyses a person’s body and picks out where the joints are to create a real-time 3D skeleton figure. An algorithm then recognises movements made by this model that indicate aggressive acts such as kicking, pushing, hitting and throwing.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

Unlike Kinect, Kintense doesn’t require people to be facing the camera. In trials, some actions like kicking were recognized with 90 per cent accuracy, but other movements, like punching and throwing, were trickier to spot. The system, designed by researchers at the University of Virginia, was created to warn medical staff if a patient is acting violently – but it could also be used in security cameras. It was presented at the SenSys conference in Rome, Italy.

“Using vision and acoustic sensors originally developed for games is now a very powerful paradigm for many different kinds of applications, including health,” says team member Jack Stankovic. They plan to upgrade the system so it can recognize verbal aggression, too.