[HN Gopher] Extracting Zooming Shots from 600 Hrs of Police Heli... ___________________________________________________________________ Extracting Zooming Shots from 600 Hrs of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage Author : jbegley Score : 108 points Date : 2022-10-27 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lav.io) (TXT) w3m dump (lav.io) | pdntspa wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | bitwize wrote: | 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. | tantalor wrote: | [citation needed] | linsomniac wrote: | The thing about Enemy of the State (1998) is, that 90+% of the | stuff in it was doable with 1998 technology. | airstrike wrote: | _> 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 | treeman79 wrote: | 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. | seizethegdgap wrote: | Definitely doesn't sound completely made up. Nope. | jtr1 wrote: | Which city did you move from? | mike_d wrote: | 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. | williamcotton wrote: | It's not pearl clutching. It is an affectation put on in order | to emphasize the television police drama trope of high action, | high impact digital surveillance. | | This is in contrast to hours upon hours of footage of almost | nothing happening at all. | SKILNER wrote: | > pearl clutching | | Says it all | alistairSH wrote: | I don't see anything concerning about the videos. But, I do | think they should be shared with the public by default. Maybe | after a short delay to allow redaction of sensitive scenes | (which would in turn need to be acknowledged and explained and | subject to future FOIA-style requests). | | Same for body-cams worn by beat officers. | | And in both cases, missing video (including purposefully | obscured by car hood, etc) should be grounds for discipline. | Volt wrote: | Quite a lot of pearl clutching going on in this comment. | | Here's the quote about the street names: | | > 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. | | Struck. Doesn't sound like a value judgement to me. The only | thing the author has an explicit problem with is the level of | detail the camera captures. I see two sentences in reference to | this. I wonder why you thought the first sentence was necessary | (I'll leave the arguments that don't actually address anything | in the article alone). | 14u2c wrote: | Did you not finish the article? Later: | | > 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. To put it another way, the footage is a product of the | fantasy that the role of the police is to protect us from | ubiquitous hidden danger, a fantasy generated in no small | part by the police themselves. | contravariant wrote: | Any comment on anything is automatically considered | criticism. It's a useful rule to keep in mind. | | Note that this is not criticism, if anything I'm agreeing and | expanding on what you said. | dawnerd wrote: | Was going to say, those road overlays are common if you watch | chase footage. ABC7 has a cool setup. | wahern wrote: | > 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 | | High-speed car chases are definitely a thing of the past in | metropolitan California, but in most cases once they break off | that's the end of it. The bad guy gets away until they pop up | somewhere else, hopefully not within easy reach of an escape | car. The helicopter chase was always and remains a relatively | exceptional case. | girvo wrote: | Why is that? Is it because of the expense of the flights | themselves? | txru wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | TaylorAlexander wrote: | Throwing away the evidence doesn't help victims of police | abuse though. | txru wrote: | 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. | arwhatever wrote: | Agreed - police should be compelled to ensure the same | level of diligence with their body cams as I'm sure they do | to ensuring their sidearm is loaded at the start of the | shift. | site-packages1 wrote: | 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? | gopher_space wrote: | There's enough overlap in your domains that an editor might | make assumptions about camerawork. | drewzero1 wrote: | I didn't last a minute before getting dizzy, but I'm a bit more | curious to see the few seconds after the zoom. | christiangenco wrote: | 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. | googlryas wrote: | It's also the only obvious answer for how to provide location | information. Should street names be somewhere _not_ overlaid | near the street itself? | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: | 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. | bdcravens wrote: | Don't know about Griffin, but Commerce and Main are pretty | common in downtown cities. Commerce and Main is an intersection | in downtown Houston. | abeppu wrote: | > 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." | bdcravens wrote: | > 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. | andrewflnr wrote: | 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. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | 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. | danbr wrote: | Enhance! | rogers18445 wrote: | If the article writer is concerned about some helicopter footage, | he would have an aneurysm over this: | 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 wrote: | 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. | noodlesUK wrote: | 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. | bdcravens wrote: | 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 wrote: | > 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 wrote: | 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. | linsomniac wrote: | I'm assuming the overlay works by GPS location of the copter, | and camera feedback to say what direction it's pointed and the | zoom level. Combine that with a topo map of the area and | OpenStreetMaps, and it's straightfoward to map the camera | output image to what part of the ground that represents, and | generate the overlays. | tetha wrote: | 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. | quasarj wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | metadat wrote: | 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. | ebilgenius wrote: | 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. | bjt2n3904 wrote: | > 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-10-27 23:00 UTC)