How Have People Responded to Pandemic?

Fascinating piece, recall using data from 'discovered' cameras to determine  city walking traffic patterns.   Also using data from public cameras, with scrubbed facial images, could be acquired for similar analysis.  Today with a increased attention to privacy,  much of this data would have to be further scrubbed of signs of identity.   Still very useful patterns of  usage and behavior of people over time in the pandemic could be derived.   Note the use of 120K cameras here to generate data worldwide.

How Have People Have Responded to Covid-19 Restrictions Around the World?
Purdue University News
By Kayla Wiles

Purdue University engineers have built a website that pools live public videos and images from about 30,000 network cameras in more than 100 countries, to make it easier to analyze responses to Covid-19 restriction policies. The system automatically discovers cameras in public spaces, then an algorithm saves image data and downloads videos every 10 minutes or so, to be sent to cloud data centers for processing. The discovered cameras are part of a system called the Continuous Analysis of Many CAMeras, which taps roughly 120,000 cameras worldwide. The data also is helping to construct models for human interactions and disease proliferation.  ... ' 

Advances in Event-Based Cameras

This was brought to my attention based on a project we addressed some time ago, the term 'event based camera'  was brought up as a potential solution.  To address the significant monitoring of lab work.    Here advances in the idea are described.  I am passing this on directly to those that were involved in that work, it may be relevant.

Prophesee’s Event-Based Camera Reaches High Resolution
Embedded vision startup Prophesee teams with Sony to shrink its pixel size to less than 5 micrometers    In IEEE Spectrum  By Samuel K. Moore

There’s something inherently inefficient about the way video captures motion today. Cameras capture frame after frame at regular intervals, but most of the pixels in those frames don’t change from one to the other, and whatever is moving in those frames is only captured episodically.

Event-based cameras work differently; their pixels only react if they detect a change in the amount of light falling on them. They capture motion better than any other camera, while generating only a small amount of data and burning little power.

Paris-based startup Prophesee has been developing and selling event-based cameras since 2016, but the applications for their chips were limited. That’s because the circuitry surrounding the light-sensing element took up so much space that the imagers had a fairly low resolution. In a partnership announced this week at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, Prophesee used Sony technology to put that circuitry on a separate chip that sits behind the pixels.
... " 

Drones and Event Cameras

Drone With Event Camera Takes First Autonomous Flight     By Evan Ackerman

Inspired by insect eyes, an event-based camera tracks changes rather than recording images to help drones move fast and reliably.

A few years ago, Davide Scaramuzza’s lab at the University of Zurich introduced us to the usefulness of a kind of dynamic vision sensor called an event camera. Event cameras are almost entirely unlike a normal sort of camera, but they’re ideal for small and fast moving robots when you care more about not running into things than you do about knowing exactly what those things are.

In a paper submitted to Robotics and Automation Letters, Antoni Rosinol Vidal, Henri Rebecq, Timo Horstschaefer, and Professor Scaramuzza present the very first time an event camera has been used to autonomously pilot a drone, and it promises to enable things that drones have never been able to do before.  .... "