Surveillance

If it hasn't become apparent to you yet, you are living in an age when your every online step is being monitored. The notion of communications privacy has been steamrolled in the interests of security, and the occasional tiny chance we get to peek back at the people who make it their business to watch us is truly frightening. Two new stories from America this week give a rare glimpse behind the curtain at just how closely you're being watched, and by whom. Read More

Zephyr, QinetiQ’s solar-powered, high-altitude long-endurance (HALE), Unmanned Air System (UAS) is currently in the air and setting a landmark unmanned flight duration record by demonstrating what is essentially perpetual flight. The official world record for the longest unmanned flight is 30 hours 24 minutes set by Northrop Grumman's RQ-4A Global Hawk in 2001. A previous smaller relative of the current Zephyr holds the unofficial record of 82 hours but this time QinetiQ has FIA officials on hand and has been flying the new 22.5m wingspan plane for the past week, and is closing on the 200 hour mark with another week (168 hours) planned. It needs to land safely to claim the record, but the feat has already demonstrated that the era of low-cost, persistent aerial surveillance has begun. Read More

Unveiled earlier this week in St. Louis, Boeing's Phantom Eye will set a new benchmark in long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology when it takes to the skies in 2011. With a wing-span of 150-feet, the hydrogen-powered aircraft will cruise at 150 knots, carry up to 450-pounds and stay aloft at 65,000 feet for up to four days. Boeing calls it a game-changer, and plans are already in progress to build a bigger version that can remain airborne for 10 days. Read More

Japan’s national public broadcaster, NHK, has developed a “millimeter-wave TV camera” that operates under the same principle as radar, taking images using radio waves instead of visible light. The technology allows objects hidden behind obstacles such as smoke, fog or even plywood to be captured as live, moving images. Read More

If there’s one job on CSI that doesn’t look like much fun (besides boiling the flesh off human heads), it’s having to watch hours upon hours of surveillance camera footage in the hopes of seeing some kind of clue. In real life, footage sometimes ends up going unwatched because there are simply not enough man-hours in which to do it. Even when there is, studies have shown that viewers’ attention starts to decline within 20 minutes when watching such videos. Fortunately, new software developed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem can help with this problem. Read More

It might be a sad indictment on today’s society but surveillance cameras are an increasingly common sight on city streets around the world. Most of these systems employ a fish-eye lens to capture a wide field of view, but such lenses distort the image and can only provide limited resolution. A new video surveillance system currently being developed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) overcomes these shortfalls to provide perfectly detailed, edge-to-edge images that could prove to be of great assistance to law enforcement. Read More

U.S. forces deployed just 13 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, but although the potential of surveillance and combat aircraft that don't put pilots in the line of fire has always been clear, few would have predicted just how quickly this technology would transform modern warfare. The proof? The U.S. Army has recently surpassed one million unmanned flight hours and is now using 333 different types of unmanned aerial systems in Iraq and Afghanistan... and the growth curve isn't about to level out. Read More

Researchers at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas are developing new miniature camera technology and an iris recognition application built on a high-resolution, light and compact platform known as Panoptes. The technology is designed to help the military and border patrol to track combatants in dark caves or alleys and airport security personnel to quickly and unobtrusively identify a subject from an iris scan. Read More

While it’s not quite to the level of the Esper Machine in Blade Runner, the integration of the ImmerVision 360 degree Panamorph lens into Feeling Software’s Omnipresence 3D Security System is as close as we’ve seen. Designed to serve as a visual platform for complex, critical security systems such as airports, nuclear facilities, and universities the marriage of the two technologies eliminates blind spots to provide a system that can apparently see it all. Read More