A new security camera to detect violent behavior before hand

THINK before you swing a punch. That CCTV camera might know what you are doing thanks to a monitoring system that can detect aggressive behaviour.

Based on Microsoft's gaming sensor Kinect, Kintense analyses a person's body and picks out where the joints are to create a real-time 3D skeleton figure. An algorithm then recognises movements made by this model that indicate aggressive acts such as kicking, pushing, hitting and throwing.

Unlike Kinect, Kintense doesn't require people to be facing the camera. In trials, some actions like kicking were recognised with 90 per cent accuracy, but other movements, like punching and throwing, were trickier to spot. The system, designed by Shahriar Nirjon and colleagues at the University of Virginia, was created to warn medical staff if a patient is acting violently – but it could also be used in security cameras. It was presented at the SenSys conference in Rome, Italy, this week.

"Using vision and acoustic sensors originally developed for games is now a very powerful paradigm for many different kinds of applications, including health," says team member Jack Stankovic. They plan to upgrade the system so it can recognise verbal aggression, too.