Smokey the Drone Will Catch You Speeding

Helping automate airborne law enforcement, Palo Alto Research Center has secured a patent to catch speeders using drones. The invention resides in an algorithm called Point-Motion-Pairs (PMP) that establishes reference points on an automobile, calculates their rate of change, and snaps a photo of the license plate.

This invention can be used not only on drones, but stationary cameras and cameras suspended on law enforcement helicopters. The algorithm examines the reference points, frame by frame, to determine the vehicle’s speed, while the onboard GPS records the exact location of the infraction.

Claim 1 of this issued patent: “A detection and tracking method for detecting and tracking objects within a sequence of video image frames, the method comprising; detecting keypoints in a current image frame of the video image frames; assigning local appearance features to the detected keypoints; establishing Point-Motion-Pairs between the current image frame and a previous image frame of the video image frames, using the local appearance features; using the Point-Motion-Pairs to form seed coherent motion object models; and accumulating additional matches between image locations in the current image frame and the previous image frame to form complete coherent motion object models of the objects being tracked, wherein the steps are performed by at least one electronics processor.”

So next time you’re speeding along and see a little dot on the horizon, that may just be a drone out to get you.

Title: “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR VISUAL MOTION BASED OBJECT SEGMENTATION AND TRACKING”

US Patent No: 9025825

Filed (USA): May 10, 2013

Issued: May 5, 2015