[HN Gopher] Extracting Zooming Shots from 600 Hrs of Police Heli...
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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)
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(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.
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