System improves automated monitoring of security cameras

A system being developed by Christopher Amato, a postdoc at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), can perform security-camera analysis to identify potential terrorists or illegal entry more accurately and in a fraction of the time it would take a human camera operator. "You can't have a person staring at every single screen, and even if you did the person might not know exactly what to look for," Amato says. "For example, a person is not going to be very good at searching through pages and pages of faces to try to match [an intruder] with a known criminal or terrorist." Existing computer vision systems designed to carry out this task automatically tend to be fairly slow, Amato says. "Sometimes it's important to come up with an alarm immediately, even if you are not yet positive exactly what it is happening," he says.