Surveillance (Oversight), Sousveillance (Undersight), and Metaveillance (Seeing Sight Itself)

Steve Mann (Univ. of Toronto); Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2016, pp. 1-10

Surveillance is an established practice that cameras attached to fixed inanimate objects, or PTZ (Pan Tilt Zoom) cameras at a fixed position. Sur-veillance only provides part of the veillance story, and often only captures a partial truth. Further advances in miniaturization are giving rise to kinematic veillance ("kineveillance"): wearable, portable, and mobile cameras, as well as unpersoned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These additional veillances give us a more complete picture: multiple viewpoints from multiple entities bring us closer to the truth. In contrast to the extensive mathematical and conceptual framework developed around surveillance (e.g. background subtraction, frame-differencing, etc.), now that surveillance is no longer the only veillance, we need new mathematical and conceptual understandings of imaging and image processing. One such tool is the veillance wavefunction and metasensing: the sensing of sensors and the sensing of their capacity to sense.