K-12 Surveillance, Privacy, & Smart Systems

Via THE Journal's November 2007 Special Feature, "Does the Eye Spy?", linked here, some up-to-date details about efficient usage of security cameras on school campuses as well as the issues of privacy are addressed. Highlights include the MPEG-7 Standard recording format (artificial intelligence, below), high-definition efficiency over older systems, assessing trouble spots on the campus, privacy, and wisely choosing the system for your school.


Quoted from the above-mentioned article on THE Journal's site:

MPEG-7: A NEW STANDARD

THERE'S A BRAND-NEW STANDARD FOR VIDEO SURVEILLANCE that incorporates analytics and a technology dubbed "computer vision." Its name: MPEG-7. Unlike better-known video standards MPEG-4 and H.264, MPEG-7 is not about compression, image reproduction, or pixels. Instead, MPEG-7 is a standard for describing multimedia content data that supports some degree of interpretation of the information's meaning, which can be passed on to, or accessed by, a device or a computer code. In the K-12 environment, districts purchase technology that relies on MPEG-7 to automatically detect when and where a school may be experiencing a security breach.

In the industry, the standard is known as the "multimedia content description interface," and it represents information about content, instead of content itself. Because of this metadata approach, the standard is not aimed at any one application in particular, but includes:

• a set of description schemes and descriptors
• a language to specify these schemes called the "description definition language" (DDL)
• a scheme for coding the description

Goals for this standard are clear. Developers at the Moving Picture Experts Group designed it to provide a fast and efficient video searching method, describe main issues about content, index a range of applications, and inform how objects are combined in a scene. For more information, visit this site.

-The Hackett Security Team