The computer is used to store detective.

What man does not notice, the machine noticed a U.S. supermarket chain is in its branches on high-tech control. A software analyzes surveillance video, and offenders will be transferred - but it has not always been successful.

 

Who monitors better - man or machine? The Big Y supermarket chain in the U.S. state of Massachusetts gives the computer a chance, his talent in evaluating surveillance videos to prove. Consequence for the store detective: He has a task less, must be no longer by the hour-long recordings of events between chocolate and bargain shelf preparers fight.

DDP
Video: A U.S. supermarket chain is the computer instead of people looking at pictures

With the new technique will particularly Big Y Cashiers tricks to come, which - at the expense of their employer - too customer-friendly show. For example, if the man at the cash desk of a nice Kundin a pleasure to prepare, by scanning the barcode of the product to the face of an article, a small bag just behind the reader durchschiebt or two successive sets boxes so that only one is collected. Against such favors Big Y uses the intelligent monitoring.

Cameras filming the cash zone, a Spähprogramm investigated the shots on whether the image pixel to change patterns, as recorded for certain movements are typical. The search should favor providers and expose cheaters. Noticed the suspicious software, alarm, it sends a warning message on the computer screens of market management, delivers the video associated with them.

In the technique, the Big Y stores ordered for 58, the supermarket chain continues to hope that more crimes on the assembly line detects a human controller. Guards unmasked some unfaithful Treasurer. But no matter how many supervisors would be all misdemeanors, they could never detect.

In a six-month trial proved the high-tech surveillance, however, not always as a first-class detective, solving repeatedly made false alarms. The Big-Y leadership had to learn that their cashiers sometimes simply human error unterliefen. Not everyone on the scanner over the pushed article provided a service of love, even accidentally and carelessness were.

Supervisor visions

Despite these and similar problems of interpretation - the new surveillance technology is on the rise. The security authorities of Chicago, consider the entertainment district at the Navy Pier with such anomaly detection to monitor the emergency alerts to automatically send PSAPs. In the UK, a research project that aims to clarify whether airline passengers - including possible terrorists - in this way can be controlled.

It seems like an episode from a science fiction movie, the possibilities of video surveillance technology visionaries attribute. Sounds simple yet the example of the motorist who has his car parked on the roadside, while the intelligent camera determines that the mobile did not authorized. Even if a terrorist is a suitcase bomb on the platform to deliver, an alarm will automatically follow.

That modern surveillance permanently and reliably identify action before something bad happens, but skeptics doubt. Movements of customers and cashiers at the supermarket checkout could be relatively easily controlled. However, identifying a high-tech observers only those acts which previously were defined as suspicious. But what are the typical movements of a terrorist of the minutes until it counts down?

Also provides automatic control - especially at cash shop - new threats to privacy. As in the past year in Germany was that the discounter Lidl cameras had complained data protectors, PIN numbers of debit cards can be had ausgespäht. Still, there were still people the role of the controller over - and not machines.