For those who want to end bike theft
PhD student Dima Damen, from the University’s Faculty of Engineering has developed a computer system that detects individuals parking their bicycles and can automatically warn security staff if it appears that someone other than the owner retrieves the vehicle.
Currently at prototype stage, Damen’s system takes colour information from CCTV images when a bike is parked and stores it until the bike is retrieved. It then marries the stored information with the new image and where there are significant differences, it can raise an alert to CCTV operators. In initial tests using a camera located above a bike rack at the University of Leeds, eleven out of thirteen simulated thefts were detected.
Of course, there are all those police state (security guard state?) issues.
This reminds me of the CCTV computer program that can identify any individual by matching walking patterns to a database. Very accurate, but flip-flops would confuse the program. It seems that this bike program would get a lot of false alarms for bike theft - what if I'm locking up next to other bikes, etc.?
Posted by: Lee Watkins | January 02, 2008 at 06:59 AM