yeah, or protesters and dissidents! Use something like this to track them from a protest to their cars or homes.

Tracking gross body movements? Maybe this can be marketed to gastroenterologists. ;^)

the csiro in Australia actually developed a similar system several years ago to monitor for terrorists and alert authorities when a suspect is captured by a surveillance camera

Wow that system is insanely powerful! Good job, that’s gonna be one rich dude

This is very interesting indeed, though pulling in a second person would have been helpful for demonstrating it.

Anyone know if this runs under Octave instead of Matlab? I’m not a student and really don’t want to cough up the $$$ to play with this.

If anyone thinks that systems like this aren’t ALREADY being used for surveillance, they’re kidding themselves. I had image processing and recognition classes in college back in ’92. Processing is way faster now but the principles have been around for a while.

And, it makes no sense to compare this to Kinect. People need to remember that the Kinect is just RGB video and depth… all the skeleton tracking etc. is done in SOFTWARE on the xbox. Here’s an idea, marry this software WITH a Kinect and see what you can do. The Kinect is hardware, this is software, we’re talking classic apples and oranges.

Cool video. Bad article.

Feature tracking is old hat, enough so that limited implementations are a common student project at this point. The cool thing here is the way he’s applying it to HCI.

Very cool. Just waiting for OSX install instructions now, and I’ll give it a whirl!

I think you’d need a very high res camera for this to be useful at somewhere like an airport. So many people come and go that there are bound to be false positives – but I suppose it could be worked on!

Anyway – Good work.

I could have SWORN I already saw this here on Hackaday recently, but I probably saw it somewhere else. The method he uses isn’t as complicated as some people seem to think… I tossed together something similar in about an hour after seeing this for the first time. (I wanted to try the “learning” aspect of the project since I never had)

@John

Nope, but I’d gladly explain the concepts involved. If you (using your preferred lang) know how to capture webcam frames and read the color data from the image, you can have this basic thing up and running in no time.

Very difficult to install.
Matlab is a piece of shit, octave isn’t yet supported, and we need gcc 4.3.
Wtf ?

Very interesting and I’ll be playing with this in some depth at some point in the future.

A comparison between some of the other tracking methods would have been useful in the papers (I just skimmed, may well have missed it if it was there). The great thing about it is that this is OS thus hopefully can be used to complement some of the tracking methods used in the frameworks that are out there.

@Jay

Much appreciated, Sir! This ought to keep us busy with something to hack up over the weekend. :)

DL’ed both the compiled version and the source code. So far, the compiled version works great but the matlab source code is being a pain. I would recommend giving it a DL and try.

Facial recognition apps: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Rob from Washington writes that he’s very interested in new cloud-enhanced facial recognition apps that can be used to pick terrorists out of crowds. You know, like the sweaty mob of 120,000 wild-eyed nerds being herded through CES this week. It seems that, using the cloud, they now are able to precisely match up 140 different points on a face, even if that face is beneath a full beard or a Clone Wars Trooper’s helmet.
I’ll try to sneak into the invitation-only Homeland Security contractor session and find out about that. If I’m never heard from again, you’ll know what happened. They recognized my face, in spite of the shades…

Oh, and if I’m not detained by security, I’ll let you know about the shiny new phones and tablets at CES, too…
January 3rd, 2011

“Hello John Anderton”

Minority Report.

Slap this on a 3DS to track eye distance and separation, then match the stereoscopic image accordingly.

@Jay, thanks very much for the write up of the algorithm of your program. I’ve read and thought about trying it out. However, I have question on this problem: how to search for the object when it’s moved out of the frame and then moved back?
I read your text saying using stored pvalues to search for previous match. But I’m not sure how to do this. Any info is much appreciated.

@Bob, I tried running the pre-compiled binary program. It had an error saying it could not find version 7.13 of the MCR. I don’t have matlab. Is there a free library for Matlab that I can install to get around this? Thanks

-Thanh

I can see someone using this to ID Parts.
Against a set of online parts suppliers.

Woah! This software is scaring, eventhough it’s quite impressive.