Briefs

By analyzing a person's body language, gait and other movements, behavior recognition software is helping catch criminals and may be useful in the war on terror, as well as have medical applications

By Frank D. Roylance, Sun reporter, January 5, 2007

It's 11:30 at night on Lovegrove Street, an alley near the Homewood campus of the Johns Hopkins University.

A lone man is looking up and down the street, apparently waiting for someone. A pickup truck drives up. The man says something to the driver, gets in and they drive off.

Minutes later, a block away, a woman is robbed at gunpoint by two men who speed off in a pickup. No one at the scene can describe the truck to campus security officers or to Baltimore police.

This case last June might have gone cold. But it did not. The Lovegrove caper was solved by technology that plays the role of an old-fashioned tipster.

Behavior recognition software enables computers to alert people when something, or someone, appears suspicious. The Hopkins system employs one application of the technology to watch for aberrant movements captured by dozens of cameras - far more than any person could track.

Computer analysis of the way people and objects appear and move on video is also being developed at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering and elsewhere for use in surveillance, security, anti-terrorism and even medical applications.

(note: this program is reminiscent of the movie Minority Report precognition ...)

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