Security cameras are useful if you have someone trained to study them and be able to pick out actions and movements that might be suspicious. Of course this isn’t efficient as people do get tired and lazy and might sometimes miss crucial moments, so obviously getting a piece of software to pick up the slack makes sense.However sometimes software isn’t that smart either as it doesn’t understand context, meaning that it could spot someone handing someone an item and leave it at that, but in reality it could be someone handing over firearms, drugs, or bomb-related materials, and this is something the US intelligence is hoping to create: a piece of software that can monitor behavior in real-time.
The work is currently underway and it is called Deep Intermodal Video Analytics (DIVA) in which according to U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, its goals are, “The DIVA program will produce a common framework and software prototype for activity detection, person/object detection and recognition across a multicamera network. The impact will be the development of tools for forensic analysis, as well as real-time alerting for user-defined threat scenarios.”
Phase one of the project is expected to include normal, indoor, and outdoor security cam footage, before moving on to phase two which will include real-time video streams from handheld or body cameras.