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Comment by bcoates | Hacker News Reader

The number of drones you'd need to do that for even one localized event would be huge, and hugely expensive. London's much denser and more economical CCTV network has been a giant boondoggle by everyone whose job doesn't depend on declaring it a success.

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Military has multi-GIGApixel sensors on drones. They can watch huge portions of a city at one.

It would only take several drones to watch the entire city from altitude.

https://www.google.com/search?q=argus-is

The ARGUS-IS can stream up to a million terabytes of data and record 5,000 hours of HD footage per day. It can do this by the 1.8 gigapixel camera and 368 different sensors all housed in the ARGUS-IS.

If I'm going to be living in this surveillance society future, do I at least get an app that navigates me to the nearest open parking space?

I really wanted to build this... a small fleet of drones that would find the nearest parking space to my house when I leave work in case there is a football match on and my street is blocked. Unfortunately I imagine it's illegal to fly drones with cameras above city streets. :(

Your imagination has it wrong.

This is happening in London although with ground based rather then air based sensors. http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/transportandstreets/p...

I'm sure the government will allow consumer applications like self-driving cars to be rerouted around traffic jams, nearest parking spots. The same thing has already happened with GPS.

Except the more you want to watch, the higher up it needs to be, or everything of interest will be obscured by buildings. Which means, that, sure, you can get massive amounts of footage, of peoples heads / hats / caps. It might be useful in helping to track someones path so you can use other cameras to try to identify them, but if you want to identify people you're going to need a lot of cameras at low height.

Continuous tracking is far more valuable than having an image of a person's face and obtaining the latter from the results of the former can easily be done.

<i>The ARGUS-IS can stream up to a million terabytes of data and record 5,000 hours of HD footage per day. It can do this by the 1.8 gigapixel camera and 368 different sensors all housed in the ARGUS-IS.</i>

It takes a very long day to record 5,000 hours of of footage per day with a single camera.

Depends on playback speed.

Also depends on the army of meat-based drones analyzing the data on the ground.

>The ARGUS-IS can stream up to a million terabytes of data

Jesus. How? That's 11.5TB p/s

Complete guess, but maybe laser to satellite, then relayed from there?

CCTV takes pictures of people's faces.

Drones take pictures of the tops of people's heads.

You do understand about oblique aerial photography. The only reason you think drones can't see people's faces is because you're used to seeing aerial photography from Google Maps. A drone can certainly see at an angle.

In a built up area, though, you'll only get narrow lines of sight at oblique angles, because most of the ground is hidden behind buildings. A drone could look down a straight road, but it's not like a handful of drones could track everyone in a city.

Drones are capable of tracing a persons movements which would make them easier to find than a face picture.

It would take one drone and maybe five years at the rate the tech is improving.

ARGUS is taking care of the 'problem.'

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-free-speech-...

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