Scary spy cams at a roadside near you…

FRIDAY AUGUST 11 2017

THE NEXT generation of spy cameras are set to catch speeding drivers and hit them with fines – without even needing to check their numberplates first. These roadside cameras could catch unruly drivers just by looking at scratches on their car or irregularities in the paintwork.

The “repression network” uses artificial intelligence to differentiate between cars by spotting tiny differences between them. Researchers say their software is so sophisticated, it could some day also be used for “face and persona retrieval”.

The system uses artificial intelligence to learn from what it sees, according to researchers from Peking University. This will help the police, as it means they can catch people who have changed their numberplates.

“Licence plates are often easily occluded, removed or even faked, which makes licence plates less relevant to each single vehicle,” researchers wrote in their paper. For example, characters like ‘8’ and ‘B’ and ‘O’ and ‘0’ can easily be confused.

“The growing explosion in the use of surveillance cameras in public security highlights the importance of vehicle search from large-scale image databases,” they said.

“Precise vehicle search aiming at finding out all instances for a given query vehicle image is a challenging task as different vehicles will look very similar if they share visual attributes.”

To get around this, researchers have proposed a “repression network”, a multitask learning framework that looks for distinctive features on a car – such as scratches or the type of paintwork.

The main difference with this system is in how it uses the huge amount of data it gets from the cameras. Researchers have created a “repression layer” to manage the data generated, allowing it to only focus on both broad and salient details.

“The basic idea of building such a model is that we want the deep network to generate two independent sub-features from two different levels – coarse attributes and details,” the researchers write.

This means “that each sub-feature can embed more discriminative information for that level and can be better used to perform precise retrieval tasks”. It is likely the cameras will be even more effective at slapping fines on people caught driving too fast.

Worryingly, the technology could mean governments and big corporations could track the movements of people. The software is still in its early stages of development and there are currently no plans to roll it out. – Daily Mail