You can't escape the surveillance society that is forming on the roads these days. Whether it's speed cameras, intersection cameras, black boxes in cars, RFID toll payment systems, or the road studs watching you. Their is no longer any presumption of privacy in any driving maneuver.

Now, engineers in the UK have come up with special inferred camera to monitor HOV(High occupancy vehicle=car pool) lane usage. From the article:

"We needed to use infra-red to detect faces yet the heat resistant coatings on car windows simply absorb the infra-red wavelengths. Only a highly sophisticated - and vastly expensive - infra-red camera could overcome this challenge," explained Dr John Tyrer, Director of LOE.

"Our important breakthrough came when we found a tiny gap in the infra-red spectrum in which light is absorbed by human skin of any colour but reflected by hair, clothing and upholstery," added Dr Tyrer. "This means that dummies, large objects and dogs, anything in a fast moving car that could be detected in error by a conventional camera, are easily rejected."

The developers even have an answer to those looking to cheat the new system:

"We developed a unique mathematical formula for instant image recognition to enable an automatic and accurate count of faces in a moving car for the very first time. We can even apply a size filter to the camera to make sure a hand held up where a passenger's face should be is not counted," said Dr Tyrer.

The end of the article even hints at an additional use for the technology-marketing research. This technology could be used to count occupants of vehicles entering shopping mall parking lots. Paging Paco Underhill.

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