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China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

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121–130 of 180 posts

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#121
I'm skeptical, especially of the surveillance claims. If you already know who you're looking for and you have lots of footage of that person, you might be able to train your system to pick up that person's gait from new footage. But that's a far cry from being able to "identify anyone" by their gait, i.e. set up lots of cameras around the city and track individuals coming and going.

There are already amazing airborne camera systems that track the motion of every license plate in a city, and even that isn't the same as tracking every car's movement because you still have to know which license plate to follow -- you just can't care about all movement of all cars. I suppose someone will say that you can store all movement in a database, but I'll wager that's just not worth anywhere near the cost. Your computing power would be much better spent on computing large primes.

Anyway, it's a cool sci-fi movie premise. You can see the murderer shaving off his mustache, burning off his own fingerprints and then knee-capping himself to avoid detection.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#122

I'm skeptical, especially of the surveillance claims. If you already know who you're looking for and you have lots of footage of that person, you might be able to train your system to pick up that person's gait from new footage. But that's a far cry from being able to "identify anyone" by their gait, i.e. set up lots of cameras around the city and track individuals coming and going. There are already amazing airborne…

> you just can't care about all movement of all cars

Of course we can. For each license plate encountered by CCTV or cop cars, store a tuple of (timestamp, coordinates). This won't require much disk space, so that's not a concern. Later, it is easy to answer questions like "what places was this car seen and when?" and "which cars were in this vicinity at this time?"

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#123
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always so surprised by this community. In discussions about self driving cars and AI, everyone says "the tech isn't there yet", "it's weak because of X scenario", etc. But talk about cameras and surveillance? The tech is everywhere and can do everything with perfect accuracy and will come for you and your babies if you even sneeze wrong! . Come on. Having worked with security camera systems (I used to install the…

People said facial recognition was absolutely impossible a decade ago. Now we can remap one face to another in real time. The tech is there.

The second thing you mention seems largely unrelated to the first. Deepfakes (especially live deepfakes) require extensive learning on extensive data sets. Sure, you could do facial recognition that way, but useful facial recognition would learn from a single still photo.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of camera designs that are essentially invisible. There can be plenty of those cameras that are installed in an overlapping fashion. If you want to go vandalizing the visible cameras, you might get entered into the arrest queue somewhere but indeed the police likely have more pressing issues. Sure, if the powers-that-be get nervous, any sweep would miss a lot of subversives while picking up plenty of…

I'm always so surprised by this community. In discussions about self driving cars and AI, everyone says "the tech isn't there yet", "it's weak because of X scenario", etc. But talk about cameras and surveillance? The tech is everywhere and can do everything with perfect accuracy and will come for you and your babies if you even sneeze wrong! . Come on. Having worked with security camera systems (I used to install the…

Jbob I truly, absolutely hope you're right on every level. It would be wonderful and if we can put this sort of monstrous society off for decades before ubiquitous surveillance truly becomes ubiquitous. Or maybe until we find some way of practically/legislatively quashing it, and all the better. What worries though is that it DOESNT have to be perfect like some people here are fearing. It simply has to be good enough so that most people never truly know when its following them rigidly and when not. We can probably safely assume that X percentage of the surveillance operating in a "total" surveillance society isn't working properly or being fucked up through human error but in such a scenario we can never be sure which percentage that is or when such a thing is the case, and that will be enough to dampen a lot of healthy civil disobedience, protest and spontaneous action by people (and im not even talking about actual criminals here).

It's like an ultra-modern version of what the 20th century totalitarian states counted on: The gestapo, KGB or NKVD type police agencies of these countries knew they couldn't watch everyone all the time, and everyone knew they weren't being watched all the time (they also knew that a lot of incompetence and corruption ruined control frequently) but they could never be sure when they were safe or not and that kept a lid on individual freedom quite effectively.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#125
My Bachelor's (of engineering) thesis was in biometrics and if there's one thing I remember from the seminars it's that gait along with typing rhythm and voice are these modalities that pop up every now and then only to disappear after a while after their proponents figure out that it's no use.

These modalities simply don't carry enough information to reliably identify anyone.

Facial recognition works best when you need the subject to be unaware that they are being identified.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#126
post #24

1. Gait detector is functional. 2. Countermeasure: use stone in the shoe, tape and other things to fool the gait detector. 3. Counter-countermeasure: detect artificial gaits. Everyone unrecognized with artificial gait is person of interest.

Counter counter counter measure: train yourself so your gait parameters exactly match those of a target, to generate a false positive.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#127
post #4

In Cory Doctorow's _Little Brother_, some characters would put pebbles in their shoes so gait-recognizers wouldn't recognize them.

And in Dune ...

Darn, now I'm going to have to go back and re-read Dune considering the worm as a metaphor for the surveillance state. Walk without rhythm!

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#128
post #111

I made a couple trips to the South Pole in grad school. Down there you were either a scientist in a red parka, black insulated pants, and white boots or support staff in brown carharts. No part of the body could be seen at a distance and even the gloves were standard issue. What constantly amazed me was how you could see someone walking a quarter mile away and instantly know exactly who it was. The South Pole is a sm…

When I hear a roommate or family member walking down the stairs somewhere else in the house, I can immediately tell who it is based on the sound of the pattern of how fast and how hard they are walking.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#129
post #16

Top 10 technologies that sound scary when in an article starting with 'China'. I'm guessing one day we'll look back on these clickbaits and say they're racist.

They are scarier from China because they have a recent history of more authoritarian government control

Chinese government has done very little to oppress USA residents. USA government, OTOH...
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