Passenger airlines could be the next place where surveillance cameras are used to monitor people.<\/p>\n
A new European surveillance system uses multiple cameras and software that tried to detect terrorists or other dangers caused by people on an aircraft.<\/p>\n
The European Union’s Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment project uses a camera mounted on every passenger seat and six wide-angle surveillance cameras to monitor the aisles. Software then analyses the footage to detect possible terrorist activity or “air-rage” incidents, by recording people’s facial expressions.<\/p>\n
The new surveillance system has reportedly performed well in tests last January that simulated terrorist and troublesome passenger behavior situations on a fake passenger plane.<\/p>\n
The new surveillance software must deal with the challenging environment of a full plane cabin.<\/p>\n
As people move around they often obscure one another, causing a risk the computer will lose track of some of the hundreds of people it must monitor on a plane. To work around this, the surveillance software constantly matches views of people from different cameras to track and monitor their activity.<\/p>\n
Varying suspicious movements and behaviors and combinations of both can trigger the system.<\/p>\n
Much of the software’s ability to recognize threats relies on sensitive information gathered from the intelligence community.<\/p>\n
However, the new surveillance system will require thousands of tests on everyday people in different situations before it can be used reliably for detecting threats on passenger airlines.<\/p>\n