Booths at the U.S. Maritime Security Expo showcase machine guns, chase boats and bullet-proof barriers. But year to year, products that are smarter and more virtual take over part of the exhibit floor. This week, Singapore-based Stratech Systems Limited (slow, Flash-bound site) demonstarted an array of computer vision systems that keep track of security problems visually. For the maritime crowd the Vessel Image Processing System tracks ships in the harbor and maps location data to maps of restricted areas and early warning threat algorithms.
A more down-to-earth app is the Intelligent Vehicle Access Control System. Identifying cars by license plate scans, cameras in the road bed digitize the undercarriages of cars going into and out of restricted parking areas. Smart software then compares the stored picture of a clean undercarriage, and the system beeps when it finds bomb-like objects (or any other anomalies) affixed to the bottom of the car. (I boosted the red pixels in the demo image to show the detail.)
Every day there are more security cameras pointed at us from the roofs of buildings, the grilles of cop cars and the tops of traffic light poles. Now subterranean cameras will be peeking up our undercarriages as we drive by. There aren't enough people to watch all those TV screens, but in the future scary smart robots like Stratech's will be watching out for us, with or without our knowledge.
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