Well, I’m about to embark on my fifth annual pilgrimage to the SPIE Europe Security and Defence conference to participate in the special session Optics and Photonics for Counterterrorism and Crime Fighting V held this year on 31 August to 1 September in Berlin.  While the special session is primarily sponsored by the UK Ministry of Defence I have been, sometimes, the sole US participant.  For the last several years I have I have been on the program committee, given presentations, and moderated panel discussions.  Last year I moderated a panel discussion entitled, The Future for Optics and Photonics in Security (pgs 21 & 22), and will continue to do so this year.  Last year I presented a version of the Video Roadmap that is the subject of another of my blogs.  Now that it is published I intend to revisit it and invite input to update it and make it a living document. 

Last year the session wrap-up produced the following summary for” What’s Next?”

• Hardware Needs:
  • Instrumentation available at lower cost
• Needs from Users:
  • A better definition of what are we looking for
  •  
    • Definition of improvised threat
  • An ability to collect open source data on IEDs from web
• Algorithm Needs:
  • Fusion of detectors with databases
  • Video analytics
  • Greater speed (real time or greater) > Real time analysis
  • Greater accuracy; lower false alarms
  • Refined/improved biometrics
• System Technology Needs:
  • Answer the question -- Is there information in the scene?
  • Make unknown unknowns into known unknowns
  • Multi-modal/multi-media solutions
• Infrastructure Needs:
  • More data sets required to define problems.  Real data

If one scrutinizes this summary list one obvious conclusion to be drawn is that in order to achieve many of the enumerated short comings requires more than significant improvements in video technology alone – there is a realization that modest improvements in video (algorithmic) technology comes at a higher and higher price.  To that end, there was much agreement that a need to assist video processing by use of other modalities and other media was high.  So it will be interesting this year so see if any multimodal/multimedia presentations are made outside the panel discussion moderated by Doug Burgess entitled:  Getting the best performance by the combined use of optics and signal processing - hardware and software approaches that work together and complement each other.  I am certainly looking forward to any insight that may be gleaned.

It is my plan to publish at least one follow-up report in this blog that summarizes the outcome of this year’s session.  Stay tuned!