Bill Swearingen has spent the past year running largely the same test, over and over again. The goal was to produce a computer-generated pattern that could block the surveillance cameras lining America's streets from detecting it. Some 31 million tests later, Swearingen says he can now produce patterns on-demand that, when applied to clothing and objects, prevent some of the most commonly deployed license plate readers and surveillance cameras from detecting whatever the pattern covers, from people to vehicles. In recent years, surveillance cameras have been supercharged with the ability to detect what is happening in the footage being recorded, from tracking the license plates of speeding vehicles to using facial recognition to identify suspected criminals, albeit with mixed success and sometimes terrifying results. The detection algorithms that power most surveillance cameras today can sift through vast amounts of footage, allowing law enforcement to pick out activity of interest,...
learn more
