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

Steve Mann

Abstract: Surveillance is an established practice that generally involves fixed 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, together with wireless communication technologies, 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. More importantly we need new tools for understanding the many veillances and how they interact. Therefore this paper introduces metaveillance and the veillance wavefunction for metasensing: the sensing of sensors and the sensing of their capacity to sense.