A fly-tipper dressed as a giant purple T. rex has been caught on camera dumping rubbish in a street. The brightly coloured rogue raptor was spotted checking for traffic before crossing a road in Southend, Essex. The prehistoric predator then looks around before slinging two black bin bags to the ground next to large black bin. Footage of the incident, first reported by Your Southend, was captured on a resident's CCTV just before 21:30 GMT on Tuesday. The city council told the BBC it had not received any reports of fly-tipping in relation to the incident.

Flock Safety is pitching its police-style drone program to private businesses. It could bring aerial surveillance to shopping centers, warehouses, and hospitals. Flock Safety, whose drones were once reserved for police departments, is now offering them for private-sector security, the company announced today, with potential customers including including businesses intent on curbing shoplifting. Companies in the US can now place Flock's drone docking stations on their premises. If the company has a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly beyond visual line of sight (these are becoming easier to get), its security team can fly the drones within a certain radius, often a few miles. "Instead of a 911 call [that triggers the drone], it's an alarm call," says Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now directs Flock's drone program.

Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at privacy group BigBrotherWatch, said: "Sainsbury's decision to trial Orwellian facial recognition technology in its shops is deeply disproportionate and chilling. "Sainsbury's should abandon this trial and the government must urgently step in to prevent the unchecked spread of this invasive technology." Sainsbury's said incidents of theft, abuse and threatening behaviour "continue to rise" despite working with the police and government, adding that it is "affecting Sainsbury's teams across the UK daily". Mr Roberts, boss of the supermarket chain,added: "We have listened to the deep concerns our colleagues and customers have and they're right to expect us to act. "We understand that facial recognition technology can raise valid questions about data and privacy."

Rite Aid used facial recognition systems to identify shoppers that were previously deemed "likely to engage" in shoplifting without customer consent and misidentified people – particularly women and Black, Latino or Asian people – on "numerous" occasions, according to a new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. As part of the settlement, Rite Aid has been forbidden from deploying facial recognition technology in its stores for five years. The FTC said in a federal court complaint that Rite Aid used facial recognition technology in hundreds of stores from October 2012 to July 2020 to identify shoppers "it had previously deemed likely to engage in shoplifting or other criminal behavior". The technology sent alerts to Rite Aid employees either by email or phone when it identified people entering the store on its watchlist. The FTC said in its complaint that store employees would then put those people under increased surveillance, ban them from making purchases or accuse them in front of friends, family and other customers of previously committing crimes.

Japanese police will begin testing a draconian network of AI-enhanced security cameras -- hoping to stop major crimes before they happen. The pre-crime monitoring tests, reminiscent of the 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report, will intentionally avoid using the tech's'facial recognition' capabilities, according to Japan's National Police Agency. Instead the AI cameras will focus on machine-learning pattern recognition of three types: 'behavior detection' for suspicious activities, 'object detection' for guns and other weapons, and'intrusion detection' for the protection of restricted areas. Japanese police officials said they intend to launch their AI test program sometime during this fiscal year, which ends March 2024 in Japan. While some counterterrorism experts maintain that the new AI-powered cameras will'help to deploy police officers more efficiently' providing'more means for vigilance,' others worry about introducing hidden algorithmic biases into police work.

Sports Direct, Spar, Budgens, Costcutter and Southern Co-op are now among the growing number of British retailers using a controversial Chinese state-owned facial-recognition system. The biometric cameras work by scanning the faces of shoppers so they can be checked against a database of suspected criminals. But they have been branded'Orwellian' and'unlawful' by critics, who claim that staff could add people to a secret'blacklist' without them knowing. So how does the facial-recognition system work, and which shops are already using it? Here, MailOnline breaks down everything you need to know about the controversial technology.

It is often convenient to combine precision and recall into a single metric called the F1 score, in particular, if you need a simple way to compare two classifiers. The F1 score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall. The F1 score favors classifiers that have similar precision and recall. This is not always what you want: in some contexts, you mostly care about precision, and in other contexts, you really care about the recall. For example, if you trained a classifier to detect videos that are safe for kids, you would probably prefer a classifier that rejects many good videos (low recall) but keeps only safe ones (high precision), rather than a classifier that has a much higher recall but lets a few really bad videos show up in your product (in such cases, you may even want to add a human pipeline to check the classifier's video selection). On the other hand, suppose you train a classifier to detect shoplifters on surveillance images: it is probably fine if your classifier has only 30% precision as long as it has 99% recall (sure, the security guards will get a few false alerts, but almost all shoplifters will get caught).

Paul Hildreth peered at a display of dozens of images from security cameras surveying his Atlanta school district and settled on one showing a woman in a bright yellow shirt walking a hallway. A mouse click instructed the artificial intelligence-equipped system to find other images of the woman, and it immediately stitched them into a video narrative of where she was currently, where she had been and where she was going. There was no threat, but Hildreth's demonstration showed what's possible with AI-powered cameras. If a gunman were in one of his schools, the cameras could quickly identify the shooter's location and movements, allowing police to end the threat as soon as possible, said Hildreth, emergency operations coordinator for the Fulton County School District. AI is transforming surveillance cameras from passive sentries into active observers that can identify people, suspicious behavior and guns, amassing large amounts of data that help them learn over time to recognize mannerisms, gait and dress.

A Japanese startup has developed software that can identify potential shoplifters on video surveillance footage. Japanese startup Vaak has developed artificial intelligence (AI) software that looks for potential shoplifters on video surveillance footage. Last year, Vaak helped catch a shoplifter at a convenience store in Yokohama, Japan. The startup had set up its software in the shop as a test case, and was able to identify previously undetected shoplifting activity. The ability to detect and analyze unusual human behavior also has other applications.

It's watching, and knows a crime is about to take place before it happens. Vaak, a Japanese startup, has developed artificial intelligence software that hunts for potential shoplifters, using footage from security cameras for fidgeting, restlessness and other potentially suspicious body language. While AI is usually envisioned as a smart personal assistant or self-driving car, it turns out the technology is pretty good at spotting nefarious behavior. Like a scene out of the movie "Minority Report," algorithms analyze security-camera footage and alert staff about potential thieves via a smartphone app. The goal is prevention; if the target is approached and asked if they need help, there's a good chance the theft never happens.