A group of Taiwanese researchers working under a government-sponsored research project recently unveiled a new visual surveillance technology they said could identify illegal acts while still protecting individuals’ privacy.
Tsai Wen-hsiang (蔡文祥), a professor at National Chiao Tung University, demonstrated on Friday how human movement in designated areas can be removed from surveillance footage to avoid infringing of people’s privacy.
“Security cameras are everywhere now. For example, it will be a privacy concern if these cameras happen to take footage of someone’s window and someone in the window happens to be doing something private,” he said.
The technology can erase human activity in windows and other places from the footage, but “authorized people, such as the police, can access these hidden sections by using a password,” the professor said.
The technology can also put authentication codes in the footage to indicate altered areas if any exist.
Tsai said the technology is particularly timely given the rising prominence of visual surveillance throughout the world in response to high-profile attacks.
“The world has attached great importance to the development of visual surveillance following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the London subway bombing, the hotel attacks in India and others,” Tsai said.
This and other technologies introduced were the latest results of an ongoing government project led by Tsai aimed at building an intelligent monitoring environment based on computer vision.
A total of 150 technologies have been launched under the project in the past seven years.
More than 60 of the 150 technologies have been transferred to about 40 local companies and the transfers have led the private sector to invest NT$300 million (US$9.4 million) in the industry, Tsai said.
The project is designed to help local companies gain a leading position in the security surveillance industry and further explore overseas business opportunities, Tsai said.
One of the technologies included can detect prohibited behavior in public places.
“This system can analyze hand and facial movements, such as smoking, drinking or making cellphone calls. It can automatically identify such behavior, which may not be allowed in some public places,” National Taiwan Ocean University professor Hsieh Jun-wei (謝君偉) said.
After detecting “unusual behavior,” the system will immediately send out an alert, which Hsieh believes would reduce the need for a large deployment of manpower.
Mark Liao, a research fellow with Taiwan’s top academic research institute Academia Sinica, introduced another technology that can count the number of visitors to places, such as movie theaters, without showing a full image of all the visitors.
The technology can also be used to monitor the elderly at home in case they accidentally fall, Liao said.
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