Coming to a Hidden Camera Near You

This could be the year surveillance cameras get smart. Soon, video surveillance technology will have the savvy to spot suspicious behavior and alert the authorities instead of just passively monitoring an area.

Researchers at Sarnoff have developed a system that can be programmed to alert airports

Suspicious behavior has long been the target of surveillance cameras that rely on human eyes to pick up suspicious activity. "There are millions of cameras all over the place, but who's looking at them?" asks John Romanowich, COO of Pyramid Vision Technologies in Princeton, a Sarnoff subsidiary developed to market some of the research company's surveillance technology. "Imagine putting a brain behind the camera that filters out the stuff that isn't important and identifies what is important."

Such recognition technology, programmed to look continuously at a scene and spot something out of place, should be available later this year. Pyramid already markets other Sarnoff-developed surveillance systems to law enforcement agencies and the military. "Ten years ago, this stuff was unheard of," Romanowich says. "Five years ago it was a fascination and in 2003 some of these things are becoming very real."

The left-object detection system will be the latest technology offered by 5-year-old Pyramid, which is coming off a banner year. The firm still has sales of less than $5 million, but it saw business nearly triple last year and expects a similar increase in 2003 as the U.S. continues to prosecute the war on terrorism.

"It can be very lucrative down the line," Romanowich says of high-tech surveillance. "2003 should be a good year. We are solving serious security problems in a world that can't take a break during a down economy."

Pyramid, led by CEO Peter Burt, is a five-person, wholly owned sub sidiary of Sarnoff. It is housed at the Sarnoff research complex on Route I in West Windsor. Pyramid's mission is to commercialize and sell Sarnoff's surveillance technologythe fruit of $40 million in research supported mostly by the government. The subsidiary also provides technical support to customers.

Sarnoff invents the products and vendors, such as TJM Electronic Associates in Bristol, Pennsylvania, manufacture them.

While Sarnoff generally spins off companies built around its technology, it has retained ownership of Pyramid. Sarnoff has been developing video processing systems for a decade and considers them to be a technological crown jewel, says Sarnoff spokesman Tom Lento,

"We see this as a huge market for Sarnoff considering the justified concern for safety and law enforcement's need for new tools to stop situations before they really start," Lento says.

The surge in Pyramid's 2002 orders was fueled by sales of its VideoDetective system, which is used by law enforcement agencies investigating drug traffic. Pyramid sold 25 systems in 2001 and received orders last year for 100 more from local agencies in high drugtraffic areas.

The battery-operated VideoDetective unit comes in a rugged carrier that looks like a brief case and includes a camera, monitor and keyboard. Cost: around $10,000 per unit.

The system can be used in moving cars and high wind thanks to its ability to stabilize images by subtracting out the background motion. It can also enhance grainy and even incoherent video footage by digitally melding the best images from different frames into a single clear frame. For example, a blurry video of what looks like nothing more than a speeding truck can be transformed into a still picture that is packed with detail. Inside the truck, one might make out a man with a mustache, sunglasses and long hair driving with the window open and his elbow out the window. The truck's features and the inspection sticker on its windshield might also be seen. Blurred images of license plates can be similarly enhanced.

The advantages don't stop there. "Pictures of suspects and vehicles can be downloaded and sent immediately by e-mail to police departments nationwide directly from the unit," Romanowich says. Whether or not such enhanced video can be used as evidence in court has yet to be tested.

The current VideoDetective system replaces bulky older units built around computer equipment that weighed up to 60 pounds. The heart of the current system is a Sarnoffdeveloped chip called Acadia, named for a Maine national park that is a favorite vacation spot of Sarnoff researchers.

The new chip powers other members of the Pyramid video surveillance family. Romanowich says major defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing are showing increased interest in Pyramid's Acadia-Video Global Position System. According to him, the companies are testing more than 100 of the systems.

The units, which carry a price tag of about $100,000 apiece, use satellite imaging to align video images with a map of the ground. They also provide a mosaic of images or panoramic pictures by combining recent and current surveillance clips. The combined image creates visual context and a trail that allows operators to return to spots already seen.

Pyramid also has high hopes for its soon-to-be-marketed leftobject detection system, which spots bags, jackets and other objects left unattended in places like airport terminals and then alerts authorities. "We're getting closer to a system that works the way a human brain works,' Romanowich says, "a system that makes decisions the way a human brain would make decisions."

"The goal is to make it user friendly with intuitive software like Windows that allows users to go through steps by just clicking" says Michael R. Piacentino, a technology leader in Sarnoff's advanced video product unit. "In the next couple of years, we may have cameras you can wear like glasses and smaller technology for even smaller unmanned spy planes."