Hack a Day » securitycamera

Testing IR camera blocking

Kimberly Lau — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:30:00 +0000

[randy] from F.A.T. tested the theory that infrared LEDs can actually hide you from the prying eyes of surveillance cameras. We’ve previously covered camouflage, IR, and other suggestions for eluding the cameras, but haven’t taken to sewing stuff onto our clothes yet. [randy] lined his hoodie with high-intensity infrared LEDs, hoping to create a halo effect that would hide his head, and tested his results. Unfortunately, his efforts were unsuccessful. He tested many many different combinations and we’re confident in his conclusion that it would be very hard to make this work.

Anonymizing clothing

Juan Aguilar — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0000

Though much of [citizenFinerran]‘s intent in designing a suit that camouflages the wearer from security camera footage was philosophical, it is designed with a very tangible purpose in mind. The suit does not provide true camouflage (to say nothing of true invisibility), but it does create enough moving visual obstructions to make the wearer completely anonymous on film. More details on this and other invisibility cloaks after the break.

The idea is remarkably simple: [citizenFinerran]‘s suit is made of a jumpsuit fashioned from fiberglass screening with several blank ID cards halved and glued to the suit. The cards are not glued on firmly, but hang in a way that allows them to move as the wearer walks. The motion of the cards creates a visual effect that appears as pixelation on surveillance footage. Though the designer referenced and “imitated” several different methods of creating the pixelated appearance, all of those methods were actually implemented via software on the camera, not by an external hardware solution.

The closest thing to a working invisibility cloak in current development is the work of a team of students and professors at the University of Tokyo. It uses a a coat made of retro-reflective materials, a camera behind the wearer, and a projector. The digital camera captures the scenery behind the wearer and projects it onto the front, creating a form of camouflage on an opaque surface that resembles true invisibility. It’s not without limitations, though, as the projector would have to move with the person wearing the coat to achieve mobile cover. Even then it would only work on one side of the coat, leaving the other side completely exposed. Not really feasible unless a full body display was created.

If evading cameras is the goal, we feel a far more elegant fix is simply to cover your face with a hood or a gas mask. In addition to keeping your identity secret, a hood actually lines up with the philosophical imperatives behind [citizenFinerran]‘s project very well, and it’s less likely to get you beaten up.

Twitter security cam

Juan Aguilar — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:30:00 +0000

It seems that people keep coming up with ingenious things to with Twitter. Reminding you to water your plants is relatively inventive, but for shear practicality, [Shantanu Goel] created a security camera using a webcam, a few freeware apps, and a Twitter account.

To make this work, install Motion on a system running Linux. As its name suggests, Motion is a free motion-detecting application that monitors movement in a webcam’s field of view. Once installed, it should be configured to take a snapshot of the event whenever something moves; with the locate option turned on, it draws a square frame around the area where motion occurred. The program includes http server functionality, so the photos can be viewed from a remote location. When all of that is properly configured, motion can be set to trigger cURL, Wget, or [Goel]‘s Perl script to post a message to Twitter about the event. From there the Twitter account can be configured to send text messages to a phone, creating a virtually instant notification of motion sensed by the webcam.

[via Hackszine]