Palo Alto City Council City of Palo Alto Palo Alto, CA 94301 Cc: James Keene Subject: Issues

Involving Surveillance Cameras Elected Council Members: Sooner, or later, surveillance camera technology will be embraced by police departments in order to better provide pro-active service to the community, by being able to both observe crimes being committed in real time, and to record activity streams and extract meaningful information from these digital recordings after the fact. Unfortunately, the general sense of many Palo Alto residents is that the police would have to man cameras on a 7/24/365 basis for the cameras to be of any use to the police. While this might have been true in the past, the state of pattern recognition technology has long ago provided tools that allow the extraction of meaningful information, such as license plate numbers, and even the identities of individuals via facial recognition. National Security has driven the level of technological capability of video surveillance to a level that few people are fully appraised to the current state-of-the-art, or the capabilities that will be available within a few years. Sadly, many small police departments seem to show little awareness of these tools, or willingness to advocate for their use within their communities. Palo Alto seems to fall into that group of small departments which seems to be unwilling to advocate, and use, these tools. There are people within Palo Alto who claim that cameras would need to be manned, thereby increasing the costs of these toolsperhaps to the level of making them undesirable, from a cost/benefit point-of-view. Such people are probably not very aware of the state-of-the-art, which is quite advanced after some three decades of continued research/development of vision systems. The following information, available on-line (but not in the Palo Alto librarys paper book collection), is being provided in the hopes that Palo Altos elected public officials will educate themselves to the point of realizing that digital video recordings, and pattern matching software, offer a significant tool to police, when utilized correctly-Pattern Recognition: http://www.cfar.umd.edu/~vashok/MyPapers/OtherPapers/PRinVideo.pdf http://www.merl.com/publications/TR2004-127/ http://www.face-rec.org/algorithms/

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org %2Fiel5%2F5209635%2F5209640%2F05209784.pdf%3Farnumber %3D5209784&authDecision=-203 http://attrasoft.com/ The following is a 60 minute lecture on Vision Systems that is worth watching, as it tends to point out the level of capability currently available from this technology http://videolectures.net/aop09_farinella_pricv/ Vision systems are now quite evolved, so the documentation of the disciple is quite extensive. These links are intended to just make the existence of this technology known to the Council. There is a place for manned cameras, as the following video of a murder taking place in New York City demonstrates Manned Cameras: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/NYPD-Camera-Murder-Shooting-JamaicaHouses-Queens-VIPER-141306653.html While this particular instance is probably unlikely to be repeated on a weekly basis, the example does provide the capability of the tool to aid law enforcement locate the perpetrators of crime on a real-time basis. While the thrust of many of my personal suggestions is to use unmanned cameras and pattern matching software to collect license plate numbers, and possibly images of vehicles entering/exiting Palo Alto, there is clearly room for manned cameras during period of time when an increase in crime compels the police to want to monitor streets, or regions of Palo Alto. This would mean having equipment that was mobile, and easily installed on utility poles, trees and buildings. Other possibilities include camouflage in street-level structures such as fake fire hydrants, and other ground-mounted boxes that might be utilized by the Utility, or one of the telecommunications vendors that service Palo Alto. In this later case, these devices would communicate via a wire-less connection, and contain their own power supplies. The Palo Alto Police have not produced a technology plan, nor seem to be currently tasked to produce such a plan. The level of effort to research, and adopt, this level of advanced technology makes it difficult for small departments, like Palo Altos, from seriously considering the adoption, and frequent use, of this sort of technology. However, a regional police force would only have to investigate one solution, that would be applicable to every city in the regionalized police jurisdiction. Please take the time to review some of the literature forwarded to you, and watch the video on vision systems.

Wayne Martin Palo Alto, CA