One example use is bio-terrorism surveillance. Many biological agents of grave concern are not immediately noticeable in people once infected. Instead, persons live with the agent and the site remains contaminated, infecting others. Many in public health have constructed "early detection systems" in which people are observed through the data they leave behind (prescriptions, physician visits, hospital admissions, school absenteeism, etc.) in order to determine if an unusual number of people are acting ill. Thereby alarming public health early. Read the Proposal to Use Publicly Available Cameras for Automated Bio-terrorism Surveillance.
Projects in this track will record images from publicly available webcams that display images of sidewalks or roadways, and report the volume of pedestrians or vehicles appearing each hour of day (or night, as appropriate). Doing so, you will build a conceptual version of a smart camera and report whether the results are sensitive enough for bio-terrorism surveillance.
CameraWatch
The CameraWatch
database provided by Professor Sweeney
on-line provides a sample of URLs
of publicly available webcams observing public spaces.
You may have used this database in
Lab 5.
Image Processing Software
An image processing program written in Java is available for manipulating images.
This program is provided by the National Institutes of Health and is
called Biomedical Imaging In Java. This program includes many basic routines
for image manipulation in an interactive, menu-driven application.
A version of this program (Zipp'ed for Mac and Unix) is available
here (8MB)
and an automated installation executable for Windows is available
here (8 MB).
Face Detection Algorithm
Ralph Gross has provided on-line access to Henry Schneiderman's face detection
program. Given a daylight image of pedestrians, for example, the face
detection algorithm attempts to identify each human face appearing in the image
and reports a total count. Below is a sample image from a publicly
available webcam.
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click for enlarged view |
To use this program, you FTP your captured image into a private space. When you check back within a minute, a text file containing the results will appear in the directory. You can repeat this process as needed. Ralph Gross can provide you with username/password information for this service if you are interested in working on a project in this track; or, send a message to paddataprivacylab.org.
Your project presentation will describe your algorithm and provide some examples. Vistors to your project should be able to view images and see the program working on an image. Be sure to also describe shortcomings.
Your project presentation will show the traffic pattern for the location at the webcam location at night. Determine whether there is enough regularlity that if some unusual happens (such as an accident, bad weather, or a terrorist attack) whether your algorithm would be able to predict the difference. For best results, select a webcam location that you believe has a regular traffic pattern during the time of your observations.
Your project presentation will describe the performance of the face detection algorithm and provide some examples. Vistors to your project should be able to view images and see the program working on an image. Be sure to also describe shortcomings.
Your project presentation will show the human traffic pattern for the location at the webcam location. Determine whether there is enough regularlity that if some unusual happens (such as an accident, bad weather, or a terrorist attack) whether the program would be able to predict the difference. For best results, select a webcam location that you believe has a regular traffic pattern during the time of your observations.