Identity Blur and CCTV
I am looking at a monitor that shows me looking at it. Well, not quite. My face is completely blurred, just like TV images where they intentionally do this to tape. But here, I am unrecognisable in real time. I am wearing a green stick-on tag that has defeated the video camera taking pictures of me.
I am at the Royal Summer Art Exhibition in Kensington Gardens, surrounded by mobiles, strange furniture and objets d’ almost art. The green circular tag I am wearing has two Internet addresses–IDentityProtectionSystem.net and miquel.mora.design. They both go to a website for Miquel Mora, a graphic designer who studied at Barcelona before coming to London to get a masters at the Royal Academy of Art.
So is CCTV beaten by a Spanish graphic designer at an art show?
So how tough is it to beat CCTV? Googling common phrases (defeating CCTV, blurring faces, etc.) doesn’t bring up much. I think if it were easy, it would be all over the web. I think if it were really difficult, it would also be all over the web. What am I wearing?
June 27th, 2007 at 10:04 am
How are the addresses encoded on your tag? Are they merely written there in pen, printed in a particular font, RFID-encoded…?
CCTV back-end systems vary considerably, as there’s quite a number of manufacturers in the area - also, some smartness is now making it into the cameras themselves. A typical IP-based CCTV camera these days runs an embedded Linux, takes an NTP feed to overlay time on captured images, and (not the most elegant mechanism in the world, but considering that a number of vendors do not put a sufficiently-capable CPU in the camera to do SSH…) FTP’s a JPEG per second back to some central server.
Let’s discuss.
June 27th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Hi Dave,
The tag looks like a green ciruclar post-it note. In the centre is a graphic image, but it looks as much like a brand as anything else. Other than that there are only two URLs and the IDPS logo. All of the tag is fairly translucent. Now, I don’t think this would work on another CCTV camera, but I’m not sure… If I ever get in the same room with you, I’ll bring it along.