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New Machine Vision Software to Change the Image of Security

Machine vision promises to change the image of security

December 01, 2003 — CSO — Machine vision is a common name for software that can look at a picture or video and list the objects or behaviors therein: This is a chair, that is a person, and over there is a person jumping over a fence. There's hardly a simpleror more powerfulconcept, but making it happen has been quite another story. According to John W. Bramblet, president of Newton Security, hundreds of companies have produced machine vision products only to see them slain by the "blooming buzzing confusion" of the real world.

However, in recent years a synchronicity of progress in cameras, lighting and processorsall stirred together with hundreds of thousands of man-hours of development (much of it funded by DARPA)has brought the technology to the edge of general deployment. Some futurists think that's very big news. The only thing preventing robotics from having the revolutionary effects anticipated for so long, they say, has been their inability to see. (Technologist and author Marshall Brain believes that vision-enabled robots will disemploy more than a third of the U.S. labor force during the next 20 years.)

Whether that happens or not, machine vision is almost certainly going to revolutionize security. The technology never gets distracted, forgetful or tired. It is network-compatible, scalable, readily upgradable, searchable and archivable. Like all things digital, its price is on a one-way trip to zero. Machine vision not only touches nearly every responsibility of the security mission as currently defined, but it seems likely to rewrite both the meaning of security and its relation to the organization as a whole.Comings and GoingsPerhaps the machine vision application now spreading fastest is what Lee J. Nelson, principal systems consultant for Electro-Optical Technologies, calls intelligent optical character recognition, or IOCR. It differs from unintelligent OCR in that the former recognizes characters printed on physical objectsoften moving, dirty and outdoorsas opposed to ones on a printed page.

According to Donald Brick, president of Hi-Tech Solutions USA, a machine vision company, IOCR is now being used at many ports around the world to keep track of containers. It can identify which containers have arrived, where they're stacked and if they've been loaded onto a particular ship. The most important IOCR application, by sheer number of installations, is probably license plate recognition (LPR), currently used for objectives ranging from intrusion detection to toll collection.

In the context of the parking garage, the primary benefit of LPR is in controlling the lost ticket con. Every garage sets an amount that has to be paid by people who have lost their tickets. Anyone running a bill higher than that amount has an incentive to throw his ticket away. As time goes on, that incentive becomes more powerful. According to Louis Vinios, president of JPA Management, a building management company, the con is chronic and serious, since it always involves large amounts of money. And, while you could send an employee around to do manual entry of license numbers, the task bores people quickly (and bored humans tend to work slowly, expensively and inaccurately).