Surveillance is a very necessary requirement of the day. With an exponential rise in crimes and people involved in altercations and the general activities of unknown people in your vicinity, it pays to be knowledgeable of one’s surroundings at any given minute.

Surveillance, particularly the video camera kind that records the data it captures and is assumed to be helpful in preventing crimes from ever occurring, is deemed a necessity. Protests, gatherings, petty thief, safety or any other reason can be considered as the reason as to why surveillance is a necessary must have in this day and age.

Infringement of privacy and carrying the idea that everything captured has a criminal hue gives it a bad name, but surveillance for the sake of safety, whether in one’s own home or public spaces, cannot be called an unnecessary vice. But in the end, it is merely a machine, a tool via which one mode of surveillance can be carried out. It does not help in pointing out criminals or crimes going on actively without someone overlooking the data available and analyzing it. How smart is then a surveillance camera if it depends on a third party to recognize the signs and act accordingly?

This just means that smarter camera systems are required to combat the possibility of crimes by enabling them with a more sophisticated technology. Smarter cameras with advanced algorithms will help in deciding if something that is going on in the screen is worth raising an alarm or alert for. For this to happen, a norm is to be established such that any deviations from usual sequence of events could be considered as a case of unnatural activity. There is no such camera or supporting systems at the moment.

However, scientists have been working on making smarter cameras, which will pick up the delay or difference in what is supposed to be and what is not. In fact, a researcher at the University of Houston is working exclusively on this, trying to smarten up surveillance cameras enough so that they can realize the significance of something and give proper alerts to public safety in-charge at the first hint of any threat. This has been achieved by enabling the working cameras to recognize human behavior and conclude mathematically as to what exactly it is recording or seeing, thereby rendering the need of a third person to keep an eye on them as unnecessary.

This new smart technology is still in the development stage and experts are determining the viability of the data captured. The camera may itself malfunction, lose focus, and change directions and these are some of the challenges being faced by the experts. The algorithms may not be advanced enough to difference between a simple deviation from the norm and am actual criminal instance. Whatever the reason, they are working on correcting it and trying to cover all the bases so that smarter surveillance camera systems can finally give superior surveillance while still maintaining the privacy.

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