CNet reports that Chicago is adding “Smart” cameras to monitor the streets. I bet there will be more of this in public areas such as airports, mega-retailers, parking lots, and on and on.
It sounds Orwellianish, but there are many uses of smart cameras that go beyond security monitoring applications. Sporting events, robotic cameras, performance arts, scientific monitoring and just about any application that can be recorded or captured in a photo has the potential to be enhanced by a smart camera.
A couple future trends we’ll see include more camera networks as well as virtual cameras synthesized from camera streams (whether a stationary camera with a priori knowledge of its environment, a single moving camera or multiple cameras). And problems that handle recording and searching vast image streams are also going to extend the way we think about using images.
All of this makes sense when you consider how much we rely on vision–some estimates place it around 80% of what we sense.
In fact, I bet that once things get going, the market for SmartCameras will be larger than SmartPhones.