Nano-Biotechnology

New Laser Device Could Replace Video Surveillance to Protect Personal Privacy

It would be just as efficient

By Lucian Dorneanu, Science Editor

18th of May 2007, 08:05 GMT

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London's Big Ben watched by surveillance cameras

The recent years have seen an important increase in video surveillance, which started spreading from public and private buildings to the streets. The city of London has more surveillance cameras monitoring its citizens than any other major city in the world and in a single day a person could expect to be filmed 300 times.

A new surveillance technology developed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory could replace the cameras, which are highly controversial for the potential of invading personal privacy.

It's called The Laser-Based Item Monitoring System and it's a compromise between high-resolution monitoring and personal safety with respect to confidentiality and personal privacy, due to the fact that it doesn't use video cameras.

"Our system is specifically designed to address surveillance requirements in places where video would be unacceptable because of the presence of proprietary information or other privacy concerns," said Pete Chiaro, a member of the Engineering Science & Technology Division.

LBIMS maps the precise location of high-value items with the help of inexpensive reflective tags attached to the most valuable objects and strategic points.

A high-resolution two-axis laser scanner is able to look at a 60-degree field of view in 0.0005-degree increments, dividing the field of view into more than 10 billion individual pointing locations. A camera with comparable resolution over the same field of view would require a 10,000-megapixel detector.

The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria and at the Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy, have performed various tests on the new system, to assess its reliability and resistance to outside attempts to disrupt its functioning and have proved it to be relatively impervious to various attacks designed to foil the monitoring process.

Future commercial applications may include only some of the features of the LBIMS technology or even the entire system, due to its enhanced precision and reliability.

TAGS:

laser | video | camera | system

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