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Extracting Zooming Shots from 600 Hrs of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage

215 points by jbegley 4y ago

christiangenco 4y ago
Wow! I hadn't heard about this leak and used to live in downtown Dallas so when I saw the first few street names I thought "huh, Commerce, Griffin, and Main must be pretty common street names." That "sci-fi overlay of street names" is really cool tech.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Don't know about Griffin, but Commerce and Main are pretty common in downtown cities. Commerce and Main is an intersection in downtown Houston.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I was genuinely impressed. Like, it makes sense that it exists given everything else we have now, but it has been a while since I saw a piece of software that works so well against real time video. All of a sudden, all that talk about augmented reality does not seem so far fetched.
  - kevinsundar 4y ago
    It's actually not too difficult. The camera turret has incredibly precise GPS and knows exactly what angle it's at. With that, it's pretty straightforward to figure out where it's pointing at on the ground, grab the relevant map data, and overlay graphics.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      Ahh, thank you! I was super curious how that was done.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      I wouldn't call it "straightforward" but it is definitely computable. I worked on such a cartography-video overlay system about 10+ years ago, and you need at a minimum: precise GPS (as you pointed out), distance offset between GPS antenna and camera gimbal, precise aircraft attitude in all three axes, precise gimbal attitude, and a very good terrain model giving you altitudes of the land around the camera target. You also need to project your location, camera vector, and field of view polygon into a coordinate system that takes into account the curvature of the earth, because these aircraft are often many km from their targets. Very interesting project.
- googlryas 4y ago
  It's also the only obvious answer for how to provide location information. Should street names be somewhere not overlaid near the street itself?
bitwize 4y ago
Fun fact: The U.S. government saw the movie Enemy of the State and said, "We want that." And that's how we got programs like GORGON STARE and CONSTANT HAWK, which can track the movement of vehicles over a miles-wide area. Now it seems that municipal-level LE can get their hands on even more advanced versions of this tech.
- linsomniac 4y ago
  The thing about Enemy of the State (1998) is, that 90+% of the stuff in it was doable with 1998 technology.
- tantalor 4y ago
  [citation needed]
  - bitwize 4y ago
    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5
site-packages1 4y ago
This is interesting. The zooming in though, the script seemed to cut it when it’s not zooming. When I’m zooming in from wide area imagery, I usually zoom quickly to the general area then pan to the thing of interest that caused me to zoom. Is the takeaway from that part really that they’re zooming in on nothing?
- drewzero1 4y ago
  I didn't last a minute before getting dizzy, but I'm a bit more curious to see the few seconds after the zoom.
- gopher_space 4y ago
  There's enough overlap in your domains that an editor might make assumptions about camerawork.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  I think the script may just be grabbing the time when it's actively zooming and not the time while it's zoomed in. A lot of the time it does look like they're just idly zooming in though.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Lots of pseudo-intellectual text mixed in with the pictures. There may certainly be reasons this technology is concerning, but the constant blaming and projection is not informative. It certainly doesn't move the conversation forward.
noodlesUK 4y ago
I'm curious how the real time overlay works. It's probably somewhat useful for certain aspects of situational awareness, but I'm not convinced that it's that useful in reality. "keep going down abc street and turn left at the 1000 block" really isn't that good of a way of giving directions over a radio unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are. In any case I remember recently overhearing police activity where my local (US) police were trying to catch someone with a helicopter. They had FLIR and all sorts of goodies and they somehow managed to lose the guy. The prevailing theory of these cops was that the guy had just called an uber to get away.
- tetha 4y ago
  Mh. It looks very useful to me. The helicopter is not responsible for guiding a squad car to the single square meter something is happening, they just need to get the squad car into visual range. Making calls like "Suspect turning left into foo street" is massively simplified with this overlay.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  I assume the police have a GPS in their car, as well as likely know the area (especially since high crime areas are often excessively patrolled, for better or worse).
- uoaei 4y ago
  > unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are. I mean, I don't exactly hold cops in high regard, but they do drive around in the city all day so I'd expect they have some sense of geography.
  - monkpit 4y ago
    Wouldn’t it be relatively straightforward to link this helicopter thing to another app on the side of the ground officer? The camera knows the point on the map wherever the crosshairs is, just ping a GPS point from the camera interface and transmit the lat/lon to the ground unit’s GPS.
- 4y ago
ebilgenius 4y ago
That's quite the final conclusion to be drawing based on the aimless wanderings of a fidgeting police helicopter camera operator. Perhaps declaring that the algorithmically condensed footage of a police helicopter camera equates to a supposed general mindset of the law enforcement profession in general might be just a bit reductive.
airstrike 4y ago
> the fictional, fantastical cop-movie interface [is] a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place. Before proselytizing the dissolution of law enforcement, perhaps one ought to spend time researching the basics of sociology. Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation is probably a good place to start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_as_a_Vocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_as_a_Vocation
- treeman79 4y ago
  Grew up in a mid size city that got rid of police department. Sherif calls would take 45 minutes to respond. Place was a hell hole by the time we moved out. Didn’t even move far. Just to city that had police. Was drastically better.
  - jtr1 4y ago
    Which city did you move from?
    - smm11 4y ago
      Suspecting Oklahoma.
  - seizethegdgap 4y ago
    Definitely doesn't sound completely made up. Nope.
    - dahdum 4y ago
      Just sounds like a rural town to me. Whole police departments have been disbanded due to funding, corruption, and public outcry. Services are (often poorly) handled by county or neighboring towns temporarily or even permanently. Here’s a recent one in Alabama, same Sheriff situation as OP. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ggmn/vincent-alabama-police-department-disbanded-racist-texts https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ggmn/vincent-alabama-polic... > The city will now rely on a neighboring sheriff’s office in Shelby County to answer emergency calls.
mike_d 4y ago
Quite a lot of pearl clutching going on in this article. The overlay with street names and parcel numbers is life saving technology. Instead of reckless high speed car chases most agencies here in California now break off the chase and have a helicopter follow the individuals until they bail on foot, at which point the air unit can provide accurate guidance (with street names and house numbers) so they can be apprehended. When the unit is overhead of a fixed incident like a traffic stop or an apprehension they zoom in to provide additional recorded evidence of the incident. Anyone who is a fan of police having body cams should be overjoyed at this additional level of situational observation that the air unit affords.
- txru 4y ago
  While bodycams are generally a good and necessary thing, a general pattern that's now widespread is officers selectively covering up and turning off their cameras or putting up their car hoods during stops to avoid accountability and create selective narratives. And those are things that are supposed to be directly connected to their person. A helicam has many more degrees of freedom, and much less observability.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    This is easily addressed. any evidence coming from such an encounter gets tossed. Cop claims they got assaulted by someone and had their hood up or their body cam was malfunctioning or covered up? Gets thrown out and charges stemming from the stop itself are dismissed. Civilian died in that situation and there was a similar problem? All cops on the scene are mandatorily charged with manslaughter - no prosecutorial discretion is allowed and a federal prosecutor is appointed. A fig leaf of cops acting like gangsters is surprisingly quite easy to remove.
    - txru 4y ago
      In theory, yes. In practice, what legal resources does the average person have to bring a case? How do their political connections compare? Oh, they died, no one saw, here’s a voucher. Have you looked at the odds of a cop getting charged with manslaughter lately? And that’s just some positive action. Good luck proving there was malintent behind a helicam strategically losing focus, youre proving a negative.
andrewflnr 4y ago
I bet a lot of the zooms that didn't seem to go anywhere were because the camera operator thought they saw something and needed to check it out, but it turned out to be nothing. If you're looking for a fleeing suspect that kind of thing will happen a lot.
bdcravens 4y ago
> the sci-fi overlay of street names, borders, parcel numbers, target distances, and so on What's the difference between "sci-fi" and "high tech"? (ignoring the obvious answer that if it's real it's literally not "science FICTION") Seems to me like "sci-fi" is more of a boogeyman term. Many of the apps on consumer grade phones seem similarly advanced. > "the footage is a product of the fantasy that the role of the police..." I am frequently skeptical of the police as well, but only 600 hours that's mainly one moderately sized city in the US suggests the footage is more a product of the leakers. I assume the footage is highly correlated, such in a give date range or in a categorized archive. There are over 2000 police helicopters in the US; 600 hours is less than a day's worth, taken as a portion of the aggregate. We need accountability in policing, but drawing conclusions from such a small dataset is intellectually dishonest, and is literally tapping into the same logic of extrapolation that "bad cops" use.
pdntspa 4y ago
I don't get what is so sci-fi about that UI, it looks pretty utilitarian to me. Like barely a step up from what the military uses. Has the author never encountered a HUD before?1
- nullc 4y ago
  The author doesn't realize the interfaces from movies are often just polished up and simplified imitations of real interfaces. The ones in that video don't look particularly advanced to me either. Wait until the author sees high resolution MWIR imaging that can see through smoke and fog.
danbr 4y ago
Enhance!
bjt2n3904 4y ago
> It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place. Yow. What a high quality article.
rogers18445 4y ago
If the article writer is concerned about some helicopter footage, he would have an aneurysm over this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA AFAIK this was done with commercially mass produced silicon, and it was 10+ years ago. Nowadays they can probably do 10x+ better.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  Yea, the overlays are the least-worst thing there. Imagine what they do with the 2TB of videos (or more) that they are storing! They could run all kinds of analytics on that data, with time/location tracking included in there. Someday, you won't even have to pan + zoom a camera turret and will just digitally pan + zoom, because there will be cameras covering everything below the helicopter in great detail at all times. Imagine doing facial rec on it all, knowing where anyone was that was within ~500 meters of any police helicopter. Now, imagine you remove the requirement that the helicopter has a pilot, just run drones all over the place with charging terminals.
- dukeofdoom 4y ago
  Instead of planes, why not used a tethered balloon with a 360 camera, and direct fiberoptic cable to the ground. Curious how high a balloon like this could go up before it exceeded the weight and strength limits of the filament line.
  - 57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
    Looks like your answer is about 3,000 feet. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cbp-deploy-aerostat-nogales https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cbp-deploy-...
    - dukeofdoom 4y ago
      Okay great thanks, so a consumer 1200mm lens can zoom upto 8 miles. But I guess under 45 degree angle, you would only get about 4500 feet horizontal range
- 4y ago
metadat 4y ago
How did the author do the actual zoom detection? (or rather, what is any method that can work for automating this?) I'm sure it's not rocket science, but I don't know how to do this offhand.
- tourist2d 4y ago
  This was the only thing I was curious about, since the article was just leaping to conclusions and speculation.
- saaaam 4y ago
  there's a link at the bottom to the code (https://github.com/antiboredom/camera-motion-detector/ https://github.com/antiboredom/camera-motion-detector/). I use optical flow and then just count the percentage of pixels that appear to be moving away from the center. If that's bigger than ARBITRARY_THRESHOLD it's a zoom-in.
abeppu 4y ago
> I kept returning in my mind to the question of the interface itself. To how the fictional, fantastical cop-movie interface somehow became a reality. > This slip between fiction and reality seems to speak more broadly to the role of law enforcement itself, and to how self-mythologizing police narratives go on to shape the world. Maybe "fiction" isn't the right word, but _every_ new product (or feature) is a "fantasy" before it gets actually built. If people first saw AR overlaying contextual info on top of video in film, I'm guessing that's because it took some further innovations to be able to do it in real time, and reliably, whereas doing it as an effect in post production can be slow and human-adjusted. This isn't to say that cops _don't_ help perpetuate the perception that they're critical to society in exactly their current form, but this is weak evidence. I think a more interesting perspective would be (a) how much is spent on police helicopters and (b) how often do they actually yield a result which wouldn't have been achieved otherwise? I wonder if a lot of it is just institutional bloat. "We hired the pilots, and we have the helicopters, and mechanics and fueling infra. If we don't fly them constantly, it will look like a waste, and the program might get a reduced budget next year."
quasarj 4y ago
I don't get his complaint about the interface. How would he prefer it look? Obviously the street overlay is super awesome and useful...
throwaway_ars 4y ago
Wow, police helicopters have high-definition, gyro-stabilized cameras that can zoom in far enough to see people's faces? If only we could get that tech in private industry, then we could start the field of aerial cinematography.
- dapids 4y ago
  You can. Contact Hasselblad Aerial Division.
SanjayMehta 4y ago
The "sci fi" reference reminded me of a book which a designer had on his shelf. Now I want to read it: "Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction"
dfc 4y ago
I'm surprised the UI does not provide any feedback about the current zoom level. I guess the camera operator is constantly aware of where they are along the zoom out ... zoom in axis.
- yomansat 4y ago
  It actually does, there's a number on the top-right, right of Auto. Goes from 9[1] to 154, and then 154 2.0x zoom which seems like a digital zoom at that stage[2]. 1: https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=73 https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=73 2: https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=339 https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=339
dukeofdoom 4y ago
All of these surveillance tools only work if you have docile population. If you're literally not willing to shoot people the way they do in Iran, the elite powerful minority is not going to suppress a population that is rebelling. The police could not control even small riots in the US once they broke out. The protesters did as they wanted. The strategy for now seems to be suppress, de-platform and de-bank people that are an emerging existential threat to the current power structure. The question is how long will this work.
khazhoux 4y ago
I'll save you 3 minutes of reading: "I took helicopter footage, which I didn't realize would have overlay data. There was nothing interesting in the footage. It reminded me of sci-fi movies. We don't need police."
- brentpayne 4y ago
  That sums it up. no real learnings.
- hmaxwell 4y ago
  Spot on
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Also, the visual overlay of street names and buildings is obviously extremely helpful for communicating context. The author tries to dismiss it as unnecessary sci-fi role playing, but it’s clearly a great solution to the problem of overlaying ground-level context that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious from the air.
D13Fd 4y ago
My main thought on reading this is -- why do they need a whole helicopter to take that video? Shouldn't it just be a drone at a small fraction of the size and expense?
- rtkwe 4y ago
  It's likely a combination of loiter time, capabilities, safety and availability. First you need something that can stay up for a long time so you either need a fleet of medium size devices or a larger device. Then there's the type; a plane type drone can't maneuver and tightly circle an area in a crowded downtown so to keep eyes on something you want a helicopter. Then however you run into issues operating that inside a city remotely, relying on GPS and you might have control interruptions so it needs to be able to safely navigate independently or at the very least stop and hover all on it's own. It's a pretty tight set of requirements that might not have anything that fully ticks all the boxes yet as easily or fully as a human piloted helicopter. It's partially also familiarity and existing infrastructure. Most large cities have had some form of police helicopter service for a while so there's already support infrastructure and helicopters bought that won't all convert over to autonomous/remote operation and for those that don't it's much easier to follow an existing pattern than it is to pioneer something.
radar1310 4y ago
Ridiculous article. It’s very simple. If you don’t steal cars or try to elude police or break the law in some other way you have nothing to worry about.
napmo 4y ago
Important parts from the article: "In the footage, a police helicopter closely follows a pro-Palestinian protest as it snakes its way across Dallas. Two things are immediately striking to me about the footage. First, I am amazed and disturbed by the level of detail that the camera is able to capture, by the proximity it achieves. The police helicopters are not merely tracking groups of people, they are nearly able to identify individual faces. Second, I am struck by the design of the interface itself: the sci-fi overlay of street names, borders, parcel numbers, target distances, and so on."
i_like_apis 4y ago
The videos are interesting. It’s a really cool interface. But the commentary seems from left field: > It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place I don’t like cops. But to say their existence isn’t needed is not sane.
- dapids 4y ago
  The author also seems blind to the fact aerial photography has been a well established concept for well over 80 years at this point. These companies are not optimizing their optical systems to spy on people, but rather provide a good focus at long focal ranges in hardened systems, has nothing to do with police or their motives, its a general product feature.
PedroBatista 4y ago
> "It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place." I'm sorry what? I'm not a police cheerleader but does this guy ever tried to live in a populous place without police?
- komali2 4y ago
  The word "police" seems to mean something different in America than in many other places, so I'm not surprised at american police abolitionism. I have lived in places without police, or functionally without police, in the USA and elsewhere, and it seems totally uncorrelated with how safe I felt or, according to statistics, actually was. Far more strongly correlated (one way or the other) was local average material conditions and wealth disparity. Some of the places were quite populous, btw, at least in terms of density. And if we allow that the word "police" means something very different in the USA and other countries, I've lived in cities with populations greater than 2 million without police (the cops in taipei often aren't armed and their most common duty is to take statements in petty personal disputes, and we have some of the lowest crime rates in the world here). If the USA wants to respond to bad material conditions and high wealth disparity by spending money on cops that from over here seem to do nothing or make things worse (I just saw a video where a cop in the USA arrested an old lady for giving food to people), I guess that's their prerogative, but from where I sit the people saying "why are we spending money on this" make more sense. I guess you believe it will get worse when they aren't there to issue speeding tickets, harass the homeless, and laugh at you when you report a stolen bicycle?
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Finding the spots where they zoom out might be interesting. I saw footage from 2020 where the helicopter camera was watching a group of police as they walked down the street to confront protesters on another block, and one of the officers randomly breaks a car’s window with his baton. The police helicopter camera operator quickly zoomed out and looked somewhere else. Amazing what cops will do when they don’t think anyone is watching.
saaaam 4y ago
Hello, it's me, the pearl-clutching, not sane, proselytizing, pseudo-intellectual author of this blog post. Happy to field your many insults/inquiries!
- mike_d 4y ago
  You could have just said artist.
- Lerc 4y ago
  I'm not sure how useful the overlay data is for live analysis but I'm glad it's overlaid on the video as a record of state. For instance the latitude and longitude are of no use to anyone who knows what this is a video of, but it stops video being misrepresented as of another location. Style wise, I think it might actually be beneficial to emulate sci-fi films to an extent. It depends on the film of course, but the designers of those user interfaces are actual designers with a cohesive idea of what they want to represent. The alternative can often be a programmer who has to conjure the opinions of a committee into a user interface without the input of a design specialist.
- aosaigh 4y ago
  > and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place. What do you think should take the place of the police force? Genuine question, no judgement. I’m from a country that doesn’t have such a divisive and militarised police force so find it hard to understand this point of view.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Can you extract the overlay data to give a geographical way to search the footage?
- subjectsigma 4y ago
  You can now add "bitter and defensive" to that list
natch 4y ago
>It's a fakery to make the police feel… A lot of comments have criticized this take. It was a bad take, but there is a much more interesting direction in which to take this. First, in a sense it IS fakery, and it IS making the police feel. Just not quite how the author said. It's making them feel tantalized, like they have almost what they want, almost the good tech that they are dreaming of, and they are toying with it as they imagine what else they could do here in this UI if only the tech was better. The cameras of a decade from now (a decade in the future), the AI of a decade from now, the software of a decade from now, the networking bandwidth of a decade from now, etc… Hand on the control zooming imagining what else is almost in their grasp, soon, soon. Anyone who has worked in tech has seen how things go from rough skeletons, to competent prototypes, to smooth products, to wicked assemblages of devastatingly effective tools and capabilities, over time. We should not dismiss the fuzzy zooming mess as uninteresting or mere self-justifying fantasizing on the part of government employees; it portends much more than we can see right now of what they want from such a system.
system2 4y ago
"It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place." Every bit of information helps. What's the hate for? This tech is cool and improving every day.
tomchurchill 4y ago
For anyone who doesn't share OP's world view and might be interested in working on the latest, greatest stabilized imaging systems and augmented reality solutions to support hollywood, broadcast TV, (yes) cops, firefighting, animal conservation, methane leak detection and more, we are hiring computer vision, software, and electrical engineers; DM me and check out where this tech is now: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-wXCVfiNbGVBjJCx38xb46-Ds9hT6yyx https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-wXCVfiNbGVBjJCx38xb46-D... https://shotover.com/products/m2 https://shotover.com/products/m2
- jjwiseman 4y ago
  Anyone interested in disruptive technology, tech startups & entrepreneurship should definitely look into the story of Churchill Navigation. They went from a tiny company to practically defining the market, in an industry that is usually slow-moving; dealing with city, county, and state contracts for police aviation technology. Their tech innovation alone wasn't enough, it also took a strong focus on customers, like customer support that "doesn't scale". Tom Churchill quotes Alan Kay, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”: They acquired an aerial camera company so they can achieve Apple-style hardware/software integration, and innovate without being limited by what traditional hardware manufacturers are capable of. He's stated that their largest growth area right now is AI. Twitter thread with some more info: https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1570452343233318912 https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1570452343233318912
Roark66 4y ago
Does anyone have more details on the footage format itself? What is the codec used, bitrate? Is it all in one huge file or split. Are there perhaps full resolution stills available? (without the youtube compression) I'm interested in getting my hands on it to play with some ML models, but downloading 2TB will take ages on my connection. So knowing the details in advance would be helpful.
rob74 4y ago
> So I wrote a script that analyzed all 600 hours of footage, and automatically re-cut it to only include shots where the camera zooms in [...] now clocks in at one nauseating hour Maybe including a few seconds after the zoom-in would have made it easier to see what they were zooming in on, and also made it less nauseating (albeit longer)?
bayesian_horse 4y ago
I'm ok with police surveillance of public areas. The main difference between a police officer on foot doing the same is that you don't notice you are being watched and that the camera can travel over more distance more quickly. I'm assuming they delete much of the information they collect eventually. And I mean information, as in names from face recognition or license plates read etc, not necessarily the raw footage which may contain faces and license plates but in a relatively unusable form. Biggest problem there is that it's a waste of money much of the time.

215 points by jbegley 4y ago

Wow! I hadn't heard about this leak and used to live in downtown Dallas so when I saw the first few street names I thought "huh, Commerce, Griffin, and Main must be pretty common street names." That "sci-fi overlay of street names" is really cool tech.

bdcravens 4y ago
Don't know about Griffin, but Commerce and Main are pretty common in downtown cities. Commerce and Main is an intersection in downtown Houston.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I was genuinely impressed. Like, it makes sense that it exists given everything else we have now, but it has been a while since I saw a piece of software that works so well against real time video. All of a sudden, all that talk about augmented reality does not seem so far fetched.
- kevinsundar 4y ago
  It's actually not too difficult. The camera turret has incredibly precise GPS and knows exactly what angle it's at. With that, it's pretty straightforward to figure out where it's pointing at on the ground, grab the relevant map data, and overlay graphics.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Ahh, thank you! I was super curious how that was done.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    I wouldn't call it "straightforward" but it is definitely computable. I worked on such a cartography-video overlay system about 10+ years ago, and you need at a minimum: precise GPS (as you pointed out), distance offset between GPS antenna and camera gimbal, precise aircraft attitude in all three axes, precise gimbal attitude, and a very good terrain model giving you altitudes of the land around the camera target. You also need to project your location, camera vector, and field of view polygon into a coordinate system that takes into account the curvature of the earth, because these aircraft are often many km from their targets. Very interesting project.
googlryas 4y ago
It's also the only obvious answer for how to provide location information. Should street names be somewhere not overlaid near the street itself?

bitwize 4y ago

Fun fact: The U.S. government saw the movie Enemy of the State and said, "We want that." And that's how we got programs like GORGON STARE and CONSTANT HAWK, which can track the movement of vehicles over a miles-wide area. Now it seems that municipal-level LE can get their hands on even more advanced versions of this tech.

linsomniac 4y ago
The thing about Enemy of the State (1998) is, that 90+% of the stuff in it was doable with 1998 technology.
tantalor 4y ago
[citation needed]
- bitwize 4y ago
  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5

site-packages1 4y ago

This is interesting. The zooming in though, the script seemed to cut it when it’s not zooming. When I’m zooming in from wide area imagery, I usually zoom quickly to the general area then pan to the thing of interest that caused me to zoom. Is the takeaway from that part really that they’re zooming in on nothing?

drewzero1 4y ago
I didn't last a minute before getting dizzy, but I'm a bit more curious to see the few seconds after the zoom.
gopher_space 4y ago
There's enough overlap in your domains that an editor might make assumptions about camerawork.
rtkwe 4y ago
I think the script may just be grabbing the time when it's actively zooming and not the time while it's zoomed in. A lot of the time it does look like they're just idly zooming in though.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Lots of pseudo-intellectual text mixed in with the pictures. There may certainly be reasons this technology is concerning, but the constant blaming and projection is not informative. It certainly doesn't move the conversation forward.

noodlesUK 4y ago

I'm curious how the real time overlay works. It's probably somewhat useful for certain aspects of situational awareness, but I'm not convinced that it's that useful in reality. "keep going down abc street and turn left at the 1000 block" really isn't that good of a way of giving directions over a radio unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are. In any case I remember recently overhearing police activity where my local (US) police were trying to catch someone with a helicopter. They had FLIR and all sorts of goodies and they somehow managed to lose the guy. The prevailing theory of these cops was that the guy had just called an uber to get away.

tetha 4y ago
Mh. It looks very useful to me. The helicopter is not responsible for guiding a squad car to the single square meter something is happening, they just need to get the squad car into visual range. Making calls like "Suspect turning left into foo street" is massively simplified with this overlay.
bdcravens 4y ago
I assume the police have a GPS in their car, as well as likely know the area (especially since high crime areas are often excessively patrolled, for better or worse).
uoaei 4y ago
> unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are. I mean, I don't exactly hold cops in high regard, but they do drive around in the city all day so I'd expect they have some sense of geography.
- monkpit 4y ago
  Wouldn’t it be relatively straightforward to link this helicopter thing to another app on the side of the ground officer? The camera knows the point on the map wherever the crosshairs is, just ping a GPS point from the camera interface and transmit the lat/lon to the ground unit’s GPS.
4y ago

ebilgenius 4y ago

That's quite the final conclusion to be drawing based on the aimless wanderings of a fidgeting police helicopter camera operator. Perhaps declaring that the algorithmically condensed footage of a police helicopter camera equates to a supposed general mindset of the law enforcement profession in general might be just a bit reductive.

airstrike 4y ago

> the fictional, fantastical cop-movie interface [is] a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place. Before proselytizing the dissolution of law enforcement, perhaps one ought to spend time researching the basics of sociology. Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation is probably a good place to start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_as_a_Vocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_as_a_Vocation

treeman79 4y ago
Grew up in a mid size city that got rid of police department. Sherif calls would take 45 minutes to respond. Place was a hell hole by the time we moved out. Didn’t even move far. Just to city that had police. Was drastically better.
- jtr1 4y ago
  Which city did you move from?
  - smm11 4y ago
    Suspecting Oklahoma.
- seizethegdgap 4y ago
  Definitely doesn't sound completely made up. Nope.
  - dahdum 4y ago
    Just sounds like a rural town to me. Whole police departments have been disbanded due to funding, corruption, and public outcry. Services are (often poorly) handled by county or neighboring towns temporarily or even permanently. Here’s a recent one in Alabama, same Sheriff situation as OP. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ggmn/vincent-alabama-police-department-disbanded-racist-texts https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ggmn/vincent-alabama-polic... > The city will now rely on a neighboring sheriff’s office in Shelby County to answer emergency calls.

mike_d 4y ago

Quite a lot of pearl clutching going on in this article. The overlay with street names and parcel numbers is life saving technology. Instead of reckless high speed car chases most agencies here in California now break off the chase and have a helicopter follow the individuals until they bail on foot, at which point the air unit can provide accurate guidance (with street names and house numbers) so they can be apprehended. When the unit is overhead of a fixed incident like a traffic stop or an apprehension they zoom in to provide additional recorded evidence of the incident. Anyone who is a fan of police having body cams should be overjoyed at this additional level of situational observation that the air unit affords.

txru 4y ago
While bodycams are generally a good and necessary thing, a general pattern that's now widespread is officers selectively covering up and turning off their cameras or putting up their car hoods during stops to avoid accountability and create selective narratives. And those are things that are supposed to be directly connected to their person. A helicam has many more degrees of freedom, and much less observability.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  This is easily addressed. any evidence coming from such an encounter gets tossed. Cop claims they got assaulted by someone and had their hood up or their body cam was malfunctioning or covered up? Gets thrown out and charges stemming from the stop itself are dismissed. Civilian died in that situation and there was a similar problem? All cops on the scene are mandatorily charged with manslaughter - no prosecutorial discretion is allowed and a federal prosecutor is appointed. A fig leaf of cops acting like gangsters is surprisingly quite easy to remove.
  - txru 4y ago
    In theory, yes. In practice, what legal resources does the average person have to bring a case? How do their political connections compare? Oh, they died, no one saw, here’s a voucher. Have you looked at the odds of a cop getting charged with manslaughter lately? And that’s just some positive action. Good luck proving there was malintent behind a helicam strategically losing focus, youre proving a negative.

andrewflnr 4y ago

I bet a lot of the zooms that didn't seem to go anywhere were because the camera operator thought they saw something and needed to check it out, but it turned out to be nothing. If you're looking for a fleeing suspect that kind of thing will happen a lot.

bdcravens 4y ago

> the sci-fi overlay of street names, borders, parcel numbers, target distances, and so on What's the difference between "sci-fi" and "high tech"? (ignoring the obvious answer that if it's real it's literally not "science FICTION") Seems to me like "sci-fi" is more of a boogeyman term. Many of the apps on consumer grade phones seem similarly advanced. > "the footage is a product of the fantasy that the role of the police..." I am frequently skeptical of the police as well, but only 600 hours that's mainly one moderately sized city in the US suggests the footage is more a product of the leakers. I assume the footage is highly correlated, such in a give date range or in a categorized archive. There are over 2000 police helicopters in the US; 600 hours is less than a day's worth, taken as a portion of the aggregate. We need accountability in policing, but drawing conclusions from such a small dataset is intellectually dishonest, and is literally tapping into the same logic of extrapolation that "bad cops" use.

pdntspa 4y ago

I don't get what is so sci-fi about that UI, it looks pretty utilitarian to me. Like barely a step up from what the military uses. Has the author never encountered a HUD before?1

nullc 4y ago
The author doesn't realize the interfaces from movies are often just polished up and simplified imitations of real interfaces. The ones in that video don't look particularly advanced to me either. Wait until the author sees high resolution MWIR imaging that can see through smoke and fog.

danbr 4y ago

Enhance!

bjt2n3904 4y ago

> It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place. Yow. What a high quality article.

rogers18445 4y ago

If the article writer is concerned about some helicopter footage, he would have an aneurysm over this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA AFAIK this was done with commercially mass produced silicon, and it was 10+ years ago. Nowadays they can probably do 10x+ better.

ok_dad 4y ago
Yea, the overlays are the least-worst thing there. Imagine what they do with the 2TB of videos (or more) that they are storing! They could run all kinds of analytics on that data, with time/location tracking included in there. Someday, you won't even have to pan + zoom a camera turret and will just digitally pan + zoom, because there will be cameras covering everything below the helicopter in great detail at all times. Imagine doing facial rec on it all, knowing where anyone was that was within ~500 meters of any police helicopter. Now, imagine you remove the requirement that the helicopter has a pilot, just run drones all over the place with charging terminals.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
Instead of planes, why not used a tethered balloon with a 360 camera, and direct fiberoptic cable to the ground. Curious how high a balloon like this could go up before it exceeded the weight and strength limits of the filament line.
- 57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
  Looks like your answer is about 3,000 feet. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cbp-deploy-aerostat-nogales https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cbp-deploy-...
  - dukeofdoom 4y ago
    Okay great thanks, so a consumer 1200mm lens can zoom upto 8 miles. But I guess under 45 degree angle, you would only get about 4500 feet horizontal range
4y ago

metadat 4y ago

How did the author do the actual zoom detection? (or rather, what is any method that can work for automating this?) I'm sure it's not rocket science, but I don't know how to do this offhand.

tourist2d 4y ago
This was the only thing I was curious about, since the article was just leaping to conclusions and speculation.
saaaam 4y ago
there's a link at the bottom to the code (https://github.com/antiboredom/camera-motion-detector/ https://github.com/antiboredom/camera-motion-detector/). I use optical flow and then just count the percentage of pixels that appear to be moving away from the center. If that's bigger than ARBITRARY_THRESHOLD it's a zoom-in.

abeppu 4y ago

> I kept returning in my mind to the question of the interface itself. To how the fictional, fantastical cop-movie interface somehow became a reality. > This slip between fiction and reality seems to speak more broadly to the role of law enforcement itself, and to how self-mythologizing police narratives go on to shape the world. Maybe "fiction" isn't the right word, but _every_ new product (or feature) is a "fantasy" before it gets actually built. If people first saw AR overlaying contextual info on top of video in film, I'm guessing that's because it took some further innovations to be able to do it in real time, and reliably, whereas doing it as an effect in post production can be slow and human-adjusted. This isn't to say that cops _don't_ help perpetuate the perception that they're critical to society in exactly their current form, but this is weak evidence. I think a more interesting perspective would be (a) how much is spent on police helicopters and (b) how often do they actually yield a result which wouldn't have been achieved otherwise? I wonder if a lot of it is just institutional bloat. "We hired the pilots, and we have the helicopters, and mechanics and fueling infra. If we don't fly them constantly, it will look like a waste, and the program might get a reduced budget next year."

quasarj 4y ago

I don't get his complaint about the interface. How would he prefer it look? Obviously the street overlay is super awesome and useful...

throwaway_ars 4y ago

Wow, police helicopters have high-definition, gyro-stabilized cameras that can zoom in far enough to see people's faces? If only we could get that tech in private industry, then we could start the field of aerial cinematography.

dapids 4y ago
You can. Contact Hasselblad Aerial Division.

SanjayMehta 4y ago

The "sci fi" reference reminded me of a book which a designer had on his shelf. Now I want to read it: "Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction"

dfc 4y ago

I'm surprised the UI does not provide any feedback about the current zoom level. I guess the camera operator is constantly aware of where they are along the zoom out ... zoom in axis.

yomansat 4y ago
It actually does, there's a number on the top-right, right of Auto. Goes from 9[1] to 154, and then 154 2.0x zoom which seems like a digital zoom at that stage[2]. 1: https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=73 https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=73 2: https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=339 https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=339

dukeofdoom 4y ago

All of these surveillance tools only work if you have docile population. If you're literally not willing to shoot people the way they do in Iran, the elite powerful minority is not going to suppress a population that is rebelling. The police could not control even small riots in the US once they broke out. The protesters did as they wanted. The strategy for now seems to be suppress, de-platform and de-bank people that are an emerging existential threat to the current power structure. The question is how long will this work.

khazhoux 4y ago

I'll save you 3 minutes of reading: "I took helicopter footage, which I didn't realize would have overlay data. There was nothing interesting in the footage. It reminded me of sci-fi movies. We don't need police."

brentpayne 4y ago
That sums it up. no real learnings.
hmaxwell 4y ago
Spot on
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Also, the visual overlay of street names and buildings is obviously extremely helpful for communicating context. The author tries to dismiss it as unnecessary sci-fi role playing, but it’s clearly a great solution to the problem of overlaying ground-level context that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious from the air.

D13Fd 4y ago

My main thought on reading this is -- why do they need a whole helicopter to take that video? Shouldn't it just be a drone at a small fraction of the size and expense?

rtkwe 4y ago
It's likely a combination of loiter time, capabilities, safety and availability. First you need something that can stay up for a long time so you either need a fleet of medium size devices or a larger device. Then there's the type; a plane type drone can't maneuver and tightly circle an area in a crowded downtown so to keep eyes on something you want a helicopter. Then however you run into issues operating that inside a city remotely, relying on GPS and you might have control interruptions so it needs to be able to safely navigate independently or at the very least stop and hover all on it's own. It's a pretty tight set of requirements that might not have anything that fully ticks all the boxes yet as easily or fully as a human piloted helicopter. It's partially also familiarity and existing infrastructure. Most large cities have had some form of police helicopter service for a while so there's already support infrastructure and helicopters bought that won't all convert over to autonomous/remote operation and for those that don't it's much easier to follow an existing pattern than it is to pioneer something.

radar1310 4y ago

Ridiculous article. It’s very simple. If you don’t steal cars or try to elude police or break the law in some other way you have nothing to worry about.

napmo 4y ago

Important parts from the article: "In the footage, a police helicopter closely follows a pro-Palestinian protest as it snakes its way across Dallas. Two things are immediately striking to me about the footage. First, I am amazed and disturbed by the level of detail that the camera is able to capture, by the proximity it achieves. The police helicopters are not merely tracking groups of people, they are nearly able to identify individual faces. Second, I am struck by the design of the interface itself: the sci-fi overlay of street names, borders, parcel numbers, target distances, and so on."

i_like_apis 4y ago

The videos are interesting. It’s a really cool interface. But the commentary seems from left field: > It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place I don’t like cops. But to say their existence isn’t needed is not sane.

dapids 4y ago
The author also seems blind to the fact aerial photography has been a well established concept for well over 80 years at this point. These companies are not optimizing their optical systems to spy on people, but rather provide a good focus at long focal ranges in hardened systems, has nothing to do with police or their motives, its a general product feature.

PedroBatista 4y ago

> "It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place." I'm sorry what? I'm not a police cheerleader but does this guy ever tried to live in a populous place without police?

komali2 4y ago
The word "police" seems to mean something different in America than in many other places, so I'm not surprised at american police abolitionism. I have lived in places without police, or functionally without police, in the USA and elsewhere, and it seems totally uncorrelated with how safe I felt or, according to statistics, actually was. Far more strongly correlated (one way or the other) was local average material conditions and wealth disparity. Some of the places were quite populous, btw, at least in terms of density. And if we allow that the word "police" means something very different in the USA and other countries, I've lived in cities with populations greater than 2 million without police (the cops in taipei often aren't armed and their most common duty is to take statements in petty personal disputes, and we have some of the lowest crime rates in the world here). If the USA wants to respond to bad material conditions and high wealth disparity by spending money on cops that from over here seem to do nothing or make things worse (I just saw a video where a cop in the USA arrested an old lady for giving food to people), I guess that's their prerogative, but from where I sit the people saying "why are we spending money on this" make more sense. I guess you believe it will get worse when they aren't there to issue speeding tickets, harass the homeless, and laugh at you when you report a stolen bicycle?

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

Finding the spots where they zoom out might be interesting. I saw footage from 2020 where the helicopter camera was watching a group of police as they walked down the street to confront protesters on another block, and one of the officers randomly breaks a car’s window with his baton. The police helicopter camera operator quickly zoomed out and looked somewhere else. Amazing what cops will do when they don’t think anyone is watching.

saaaam 4y ago

Hello, it's me, the pearl-clutching, not sane, proselytizing, pseudo-intellectual author of this blog post. Happy to field your many insults/inquiries!

mike_d 4y ago
You could have just said artist.
Lerc 4y ago
I'm not sure how useful the overlay data is for live analysis but I'm glad it's overlaid on the video as a record of state. For instance the latitude and longitude are of no use to anyone who knows what this is a video of, but it stops video being misrepresented as of another location. Style wise, I think it might actually be beneficial to emulate sci-fi films to an extent. It depends on the film of course, but the designers of those user interfaces are actual designers with a cohesive idea of what they want to represent. The alternative can often be a programmer who has to conjure the opinions of a committee into a user interface without the input of a design specialist.
aosaigh 4y ago
> and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place. What do you think should take the place of the police force? Genuine question, no judgement. I’m from a country that doesn’t have such a divisive and militarised police force so find it hard to understand this point of view.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Can you extract the overlay data to give a geographical way to search the footage?
subjectsigma 4y ago
You can now add "bitter and defensive" to that list

natch 4y ago

>It's a fakery to make the police feel… A lot of comments have criticized this take. It was a bad take, but there is a much more interesting direction in which to take this. First, in a sense it IS fakery, and it IS making the police feel. Just not quite how the author said. It's making them feel tantalized, like they have almost what they want, almost the good tech that they are dreaming of, and they are toying with it as they imagine what else they could do here in this UI if only the tech was better. The cameras of a decade from now (a decade in the future), the AI of a decade from now, the software of a decade from now, the networking bandwidth of a decade from now, etc… Hand on the control zooming imagining what else is almost in their grasp, soon, soon. Anyone who has worked in tech has seen how things go from rough skeletons, to competent prototypes, to smooth products, to wicked assemblages of devastatingly effective tools and capabilities, over time. We should not dismiss the fuzzy zooming mess as uninteresting or mere self-justifying fantasizing on the part of government employees; it portends much more than we can see right now of what they want from such a system.

system2 4y ago

"It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place." Every bit of information helps. What's the hate for? This tech is cool and improving every day.

tomchurchill 4y ago

For anyone who doesn't share OP's world view and might be interested in working on the latest, greatest stabilized imaging systems and augmented reality solutions to support hollywood, broadcast TV, (yes) cops, firefighting, animal conservation, methane leak detection and more, we are hiring computer vision, software, and electrical engineers; DM me and check out where this tech is now: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-wXCVfiNbGVBjJCx38xb46-Ds9hT6yyx https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-wXCVfiNbGVBjJCx38xb46-D... https://shotover.com/products/m2 https://shotover.com/products/m2

jjwiseman 4y ago
Anyone interested in disruptive technology, tech startups & entrepreneurship should definitely look into the story of Churchill Navigation. They went from a tiny company to practically defining the market, in an industry that is usually slow-moving; dealing with city, county, and state contracts for police aviation technology. Their tech innovation alone wasn't enough, it also took a strong focus on customers, like customer support that "doesn't scale". Tom Churchill quotes Alan Kay, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”: They acquired an aerial camera company so they can achieve Apple-style hardware/software integration, and innovate without being limited by what traditional hardware manufacturers are capable of. He's stated that their largest growth area right now is AI. Twitter thread with some more info: https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1570452343233318912 https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1570452343233318912

Roark66 4y ago

Does anyone have more details on the footage format itself? What is the codec used, bitrate? Is it all in one huge file or split. Are there perhaps full resolution stills available? (without the youtube compression) I'm interested in getting my hands on it to play with some ML models, but downloading 2TB will take ages on my connection. So knowing the details in advance would be helpful.

rob74 4y ago

> So I wrote a script that analyzed all 600 hours of footage, and automatically re-cut it to only include shots where the camera zooms in [...] now clocks in at one nauseating hour Maybe including a few seconds after the zoom-in would have made it easier to see what they were zooming in on, and also made it less nauseating (albeit longer)?

bayesian_horse 4y ago

I'm ok with police surveillance of public areas. The main difference between a police officer on foot doing the same is that you don't notice you are being watched and that the camera can travel over more distance more quickly. I'm assuming they delete much of the information they collect eventually. And I mean information, as in names from face recognition or license plates read etc, not necessarily the raw footage which may contain faces and license plates but in a relatively unusable form. Biggest problem there is that it's a waste of money much of the time.