Capture Resistant Environment
Meant to blog this CNET article earlier on some research at Georgia Tech using the retroreflective properties of image sensors to overexpose them with a spot light. Limited applications, and from some comments not much new, but always fascinating to think about ways of taking back what we've lost. Any thoughts on this Mr. Naimark?
article excerpt:
How it works
The Georgia Tech system essentially exploits the "retroreflective" property of digital camera lenses. When light strikes a retroreflective surface, a portion of the light bounces back to the original source. While eyeglasses, bottles, watches and other glass surfaces are retroreflective, a coating on virtually all digital camera lenses puts cameras in a class of their own."The film atop lenses (is) highly reflective," said Patel. "A lot of people probably have known this but they haven't thought about leveraging it."
In this system, a device bathes the region in front of it with infrared light. When an intense retroreflection indicates the presence of a digital camera lens, the device then fires a localized beam of light directly at that point. Thus, the picture gets washed out.
01:12 PM September 24, 2005 Comments 3
Ken Leung
I wonder if this technology could be or already is used to spot people capturing movies in a cinema theater
brad
I doubt it. You need pretty direct line-of-sight from what it looks like. An additional note on the article: The article excerpt says it detects the retroreflection of the lens, while the research page says it detects the image sensor. I imagine the latter is correct, but if you could detect a lens with a similar technique you'd be in a much better position to target it, since the normals shoot out in a wide field rather than one direction from the flat surface of the image sensor. You'd probably end up with a zapper that is continually shooting at anything that reflects significant light.
Michael Naimark
The paper, claiming “proof of concept,” is loaded with finesses. IR is easily filtered - which they’ve noted. Their claim that eyeballs are less retroreflective than camera lenses is unsupported and probably only sometimes true. (They propose a “simplified solution” to the eye problem by not detecting above a certain height.) They claim their system can detect pinhole cameras - all and anywhere? How will they deal with smart dust and swarm cams?
The military has done years worth of work in this area. Nothing is cited (8 out of 9 references are 2004-5). In 1996, the UN banned blinding laser weapons because eyes and cams couldn’t be discriminated. (The same year, it decided not to ban land minds, concluding that armies of blinded soldiers was more destabilizing than armies of amputees.) This is serious and creepy stuff: Google "ZM-87".
This is also the sort of stuff the press laps up and grossly over-simplifies. After my online camera zapper report was featured in the NY Times and IHT, it received over 600,000 hits in 2 days. I received a virtual ton of email, not all of it happy (including several death-like threats), and dozens of interview requests trying to nail me as pro or anti surveillance. It's not that simple.
My conclusion, in the end, was that anyone who wants to hide a camera, can.
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