Swiss scientists develop Bluetooth software linking camera phones for surveillance

Scientists at the Institute for Pervasive Computing in Zurich are developing software that uses Bluetooth to link camera phones that can be used for surveillance, according to an article in New Scientist.

The software, called Facet, is based on Java and, as a result, can be installed on many cellular phones.  Facet was installed on four Nokia 6630 cellular phones attached to the ceiling of a corridor. 

The phones all faced different directions and could see people walking along the corridor, the article says.  When one handset sees a person walking along the corridor it transmits a message to phones on either side of it, and those phones transmit messages to other phones on the network.

Ninety five percent accuracy

New Scientist reports, “Each phone determines the distance to its nearest neighbour.  The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone's view to another's.

“In testing, the system determined the distances between each phone with about 95% accuracy.  They were placed 4 metres apart, making it accurate to about 20 centimetres.  In future, recording the speed at which objects pass by would make more accurate judgments possible.”

In the future, Facet could incorporate a more sophisticated alerting function to, for example, report when a person walks in a specific direction along a corridor or when a dangerous animal approaches an outdoor area.

Improving object recognition

The scientists will release the software as open source.  They hope to refine the recognition capabilities.  Currently Facet can recognize objects no smaller than one meter, but the researchers hope it can be enhanced for objects ten to 15 centimeters.

Comments

[Tychocat]

Now this is interesting. Granting that cell phones use a lot of different OSes, some of them proprietary, it seems to me that you could create some very smart applications by applying some of the distributed-computing techniques as used by SETI Online. On a "fun" basis, say, a social network based on the members' cell phones all tracking, photographing, and notifying each other when members are in meeting-range. Not to mention the boon for stalkers.

A friend and I once speculated about a Bluetooth network of cell phones organized around restaurants and bars, where passing customers might be notified of specials they liked, or that certain people were seated (or not) inside.

I, for one, am unashamedly uncommunicative, have my phone's Bluetooth set to "non-discoverable", and have given my cell phone number out to maybe a dozen people over the years. But I love the potential of the technology.