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

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

#131

Post by wwarner »

nindalf wrote: post #122
wwarner wrote: post #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…

> 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?"

Well, let's test your claim. Say there are 1 million cars in a city. Say your camera system covers 300 square miles (to handle nyc). The question is how long would it take to scan the images from a single moment and capture all license plates. At 5 seconds per plate, that's 57 days. Plenty of time to commit a crime and escape without detection. And again, you could've been doing something useful like capturing some large prime numbers, in order to break the encryption of someone who is actually trying to hide something.

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

#132

Post by tabtab »

krustyburger wrote: post #89
nabla9 wrote: 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.

It sounds like the Ministry of Silly Walks may need to be folded into MI5.

For the uninitiated, that's a Monty Python reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8

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

#134

Post by tdb7893 »

jessaustin wrote: post #129
tdb7893 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The US is still actually pretty good to it's citizens by global standards. For example as an American I don't have any worries that the government will come after me if I speak out against it and a politician can't have me thrown in jail without a trial.

But I mean of course as an American I would care more about what the US does because it affects me more. The war on drugs especially is an authoritarian nightmare (and practically had ended up racist) and the war on terror has eroded due process but China has a type of authoritarianism that just isn't the same as the type we have in the US.

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

#135

Post by TomMarius »

biglenny wrote: post #115
arcaster wrote: post #33

Time for some IR emitting / reflecting pants!

curious, how would this prevent being captured on camera? isn't visible light used?

If the pants reflect whole spectrum, then it should be reasonably obscured from cameras. I think GP did not mean mere IR reflectiveness.

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

#136

Post by JoeAltmaier »

nindalf wrote: post #122
wwarner wrote: post #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…

> 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?"

There're already drones flying over American cities that record the city from the air nonstop. When a crime occurs, they review the recording in reverse and see where the bank robber etc drove from (their house), then go to their house and arrest them. No need for anything automatic.

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

#139

Post by hndamien »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #88
otto2 wrote: post #2

This will cause people to start walking on the street in the same way as Fremen in Frank Herbert's Dune, by varying frequency and step length in order not to attract a (government) worm.

Which will make the staggering oddballs much easier to detect by human review of the footage, or by police/informants in person. It's like that anti-face-ID makeup that covers your face with dazzle patterns. It may work as a visible act of protest, but it won't actually protect your privacy.

I'm just imagining a person with face dazzle and silly walks trying to remain inconspicuous.

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

#140

Post by veemjeem »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #64
cimi_ wrote: post #46

Setting who wants to do this aside in order to avoid the constant 'X is worse than Y' arguments. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that in a near future we will have cameras that can do much more than identification on a massive scale. It may be easy to track things like how stressed, healthy, sober etc. people are without their consent or without them even noticing. And this would be precise , not speculativ…

Yup. Think about how you can recognize your friends without even seeing their face, by the way they walk, what they wear, how tall they are, and other contextual clues. Computers will be able to do all of that. Also think about other things that only computers with massive amounts of data will be able to do. Computers will be able to enumerate your wardrobe, your possessions. They'll be able to figure out most of the…

I know people like to imagine of all the orwellian possibilities, but it could have some useful medical cases too. It would be great to put some kind of camera in my grandparent's home to automatically monitor their health. My grandfather fell in the middle of the night, passed out, and was not discovered until the next day. He was still alive, but injured, but it could have been serious.
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