Celulares transformados em CCTV

Pesquisadores do Institute for Pervasive Computing criam programa que transforma câmeras integradas a telefones celulares em redes "inteligentes" de vigilância . O Programa Facet usa tecnologia Bluetooth e conexão sem fio de modo a permitir que diversas câmeras de celulares partilhem as imagens registradas e as analisem em rede, funcionando como sistemas de CCTV. A matéria é da New Scientist.

"Software that turns groups of ordinary camera cellphones into a "smart" surveillance network has been developed by Swiss researchers. The team says it will release the software for programmers and users to experiment with. [...]
These work like an ordinary CCTV surveillance system, but use software instead of a human analyst to interpret what is happening on screen, comparing the footage captured by each camera for a more complete picture. [...]
Complex tasks
Whenever a phone detects an object entering or exiting its field of view, it sends a message via Bluetooth to alert the phones on either side. These phones, in turn, pass the message on to other nearby handsets so that eventually the entire network receives the message.
One handset on the network also reports this information to a computer over a normal GPRS cellphone connection.
Each phone determines the distance to its nearest neighbour. The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone's view to another's.
In testing, the system determined the distances between each phone with about 95% accuracy. They were placed 4 metres apart, making it accurate to about 20 centimetres. In future, recording the speed at which objects pass by would make more accurate judgments possible.
Knowing the shape of the cellphone network provides the foundation for the system to perform more complex tasks, says Bolliger. Facet could, for example, report via text message when someone walks down a corridor in a particular direction, or sound an alarm if a dangerous animal approaches a campsite, he suggests."