Can You Spot the Suspicious Behavior in These Photos?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Hendricks Dewayne <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 20, 2016 at 6:02:49 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Can You Spot the Suspicious Behavior in These Photos?
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Jen Snow.  DLH]
>
> Can You Spot the Suspicious Behavior in These Photos?
> By LAURA MALLONEE
> Feb 3 2016
> <https://www.wired.com/2016/02/esther-hovers-false-positives/>
>
> Breaking into a run. Standing too long in once place. Repeatedly looking over your shoulder. Everyone does these 
> things from time to time, and they aren’t usually cause for alarm. But in Esther Hovers’ series False Positives, such 
> things are very suspicious indeed, and suggest a heinous crime may soon occur.
>
> Her images emulate the actions so-called smart cameras would deem “deviant behavior.” Connected to highly 
> sophisticated software, these cameras can, among other things, detect abnormal activity like a person leaving a 
> package or backpack on a busy street corner and alert the authorities. This, of course, prompts all kinds of 
> conversations about privacy, security, and control. Hover hopes to contribute to the discussion. “[The project] aims 
> to raise questions about deviant and normal behavior within public space,” Hovers says. “Should intelligent 
> surveillance cameras be the judge of this?”
>
> Intelligent video cameras analyze surveillance video in real time. The image recognition software works through 
> cameras often installed in public places like transit stations and airports, where they “learn” normal activity 
> patterns so they can discern anything out of the ordinary and alert authorities. Although most security cameras lack 
> such capabilities—they passively record everything, or rely upon a human to watch the action on a monitor—their 
> adoption is expanding. They’ve been installed in Boston, Chicago, and Washington D.C., and in Atlanta’s transit 
> system. Authorities also have tested them at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam and in cities like Tilburg and Eindhoven.
>
> Video surveillance fascinates Hovers. In January 2015, she interviewed security experts in the Netherlands about 
> smart cameras. They identified eight common behavioral red flags: loitering too long, moving too fast, standing on a 
> corner, looking over your shoulder, going against the flow of foot traffic, abandoning something, clusters of people 
> suddenly breaking apart and synchronized movements between people.
>
> Over the next five months, Hovers photographed pedestrians doing exactly these things in the Brussels business 
> district. She put her Nikon D700 on a tripod overlooking a street and spent a couple hours taking pictures, 
> occasionally asking passersby to act out specific poses—a man in a jogging outfit standing perfectly still at the 
> bottom of a stairwell, another stopping in a zebra crossing to face oncoming traffic. Later, she layered as many as 
> 20 images in Photoshop, condensing what a surveillance camera might capture over several seconds or minutes into a 
> single tableau. “That’s why they [the images] come to look quite staged, in a way, because they’re more than one 
> moment compressed into a photograph,” she says.
>
> Each photo contains at least one example of deviant behavior. But while intelligent surveillance cameras typically 
> frame suspects within a box, Hovers lets hers blend more subtly into the crowd, challenging viewers to figure out 
> what’s sketchy in the frame. In some cases, like the suitcase abandoned on a street corner, it’s easy. But for the 
> most part, it’s pretty hard. That’s the point. “What strikes me is that they [deviant behaviors] are so close to what 
> you would consider to be normal,” Hovers says.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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