Smart Camera Tells Tobacco From Marijuana 167
An anonymous reader writes "A new smart camera technology not only takes a picture but also assays chemical composition, allowing photographers to tell whether that hand-rolled cigarette contains tobacco or marijuana. Designed to speed industrial inspection systems — such as detecting whether food is spoiled — the new smart camera includes spectral filters that make images of corn fields appear differently from hemp. Spectral cameras have been available for decades, but this microchip version should be cheap enough for almost any application."
Technology Stoners (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Technology Stoners (Score:5, Funny)
At least in the short term...
Yeah, wait, what are we talking about?
Re:Technology Stoners (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Technology Stoners (Score:5, Interesting)
Such as for example, spectral camouflage. Any method that depends on identifying spectra of compounds in a complex mixture depends on spectral deconvolution. Spectral deconvolution is easy to fool, but adding a compound that provides a "difference spectrum" , compensating for the differences in tobacco versus marijuana smoke.
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However, the parent post makes a good point, in that visible spectra are very difficult to interpret, because they rarely show complex structure. The camera goes up to 10,000/cm but spectra in that area
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The DEA has had the National Guard flying helicopters over the countryside for a long time now, searching for marijuana fields. If I remember correctly, those hemp plants show up quite differently in either infrared or ultraviolet photography. I'm not "up on" this stuff, but I do know that the state regularly flies patrol missions in my area each summer and autumn.
Damn, this is slashdot - someone probably expects me to research this shit before I post it. But, "Everyone knows that they are looking for ma
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Re:Technology Stoners (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure about the countryside, but this has been done in cities for a while. It's pretty common for people who are growing cannabis to do put halogen lights up in their attic so that the plants can get bright light for a long period. Because this is above the layer of normal house insulation, their roofs show up as warmer than the surroundings.
halogen? bad choice tbh, There are really only two choices of lamp types for indoor growers, high intensity discharge lamps (HID lamps) and florescent lamps. Other lamps such as standard household bulbs or halogen are just not up to the job of growing cannabis. They convert most of the power they consume into heat not light or produce a light spectrum that won`t support good plant growth. .
there are even a new breed of colour balanced LED's which are becoming better by the year. i have a friend who use them in the vegetative stage then moves the plants to the other half of his growing room to use HID's in the flowering stage to great effect.
Halogens, as mentioned above and not efficient and produce a MASSIVE hear signature leading to what you state above.
growers with a brain use more efficient and balanced lighting which provide results which give not just a cheaper electricity bill but a far groovier stone!
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"Everyone knows that they are looking for marijuana!"
"The Man" is always trying to bring a brother down. It's true.
Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Insightful)
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Real problems? What, you haven't gotten your purple unicorn yet today?
Here, have one. There you go. And please stick your head back in the sand, you look suspicious.
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Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)
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The irony is, if the general population was stoned the government could do pretty much whatever it wanted and people wouldn't care, and if they did care, they'd never get themselves organised enough to do anything about it. They might get less tobacco tax revenue, but that's not going to last forever anyway.
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I suppose you missed this part, right there in the fucking summary:
Designed to speed industrial inspection systems — such as detecting whether food is spoiled
(emphasis mine)
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yes, i get the irony of my name and my rant....
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)
I would like to see this tech developed further to determine the quality of the weed. Then the results could be given in a classic Tommy Chong slacker voice like: "Oh wow! This is some good shit, man." "That's total crap." "Whoa! That will knock you on your ass. Far out, man!"
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Kinda grabs you by the boo-boo, don't it?
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, my dog ate my stash, man.
Back in the days when I was still smoking weed, I was rolling a joint and noticed my dog was looking at me in an investigative way. So I took a small bud of weed and let her smell it. She sniffed, and then she shook her snout against my hand making me drop it. Immediately she took it, and ran away a couple of metres. I tried to get it back, but she turned her body keeping me away from it while she ate it. During the rest of the evening, she kept lying in the sofa, upside down, paws up in the air. Eventually she got up and ate her bowl completely empty, then got back into the sofa. It's the funniest thing I ever saw her do. I don't know if it's normal or not. Do dogs like weed? Mine did for sure.
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My dog liked weed - I used to smoke it and he'd come up and sit in front of me while I blew smoke gently towards him. Then he'd get all mellow and go watch the tasty animals on nature documentaries - he used to lick his lips.
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a lot of animals like the smell and taste of it
I'm not surprised. It tastes nice. The leaves, dried and sprinkled on food as a seasoning work nicely with a lot of Mediterranean food. Unfortunately, the only effect THC seems to have on me is to cause splitting headaches, so I've only tried this a couple of times. If you could get the same taste without the drug content (no idea how easy this is - there are probably existing varieties of the plant that give this), you could sell it in the same sort of tiny 10g-for-£1 jars that other dried herbs
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I've heard of highway patrol using similar tech to detect Cheech 'n' Chong lowridin'. 'Seems the windows in the car show up purple. ..ahem.. adulterants....
Local cops just aim it at housewindows. Wonder what people look like,LOL. Probably like the old "fecal free cooking" skit on SNL with the blacklight illuminating "organic" ,
Just another product brought to you by: "Revenues from Speeders!" big brother bringing you safer motorways all the way up your drive and into your bathroom.
I think the thermal imaging
wow (Score:5, Funny)
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so the camera can tell the difference between the color green and brown? Wow!
It's better than I can do! I'm colorblind you insensitive clod!
Yeah, right! (Score:1)
I usually mix!
tobacco or marijuana? (Score:5, Funny)
I couldn't find either of these words in TFA. Whoever wrote the summary needs to put down the bong for a while.
Does it? (Score:3, Informative)
scan carcinogen vapor (Score:2, Interesting)
Police will be ordering this soon (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Police will be ordering this soon (Score:5, Insightful)
Tickets are one thing, but when you have a paramilitary force prepared to arrest or kill anyone over these plants, you are dealing with tyranny.
Re:Police will be ordering this soon (Score:5, Insightful)
I am more concerned about them increasing the number of helicopter patrols. Where I live now, the state sends out helicopters to look for cannabis plants, then indiscriminately arrests anyone who has a cannabis plant on their property.
What's the ROI on that, you think?
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What's the ROI on that, you think?
Could be pretty good if the forfeiture laws are stilted towards law enforcement.
Re:Police will be ordering this soon (Score:5, Insightful)
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What's the ROI on that, you think?
That depends on quality and quantity. Are we talking about simple mexi brick weed or some funky shit from Amsterday or BC? Are we talking about ounces or pounds? And the most important question is just how much of the police force is smoking it?
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I am more concerned about them increasing the number of helicopter patrols. Where I live now, the state sends out helicopters to look for cannabis plants, then indiscriminately arrests anyone who has a cannabis plant on their property. We recently had someone in my county arrested and convicted of cultivating marijuana because the patrol spotted feral hemp on his property. Tickets are one thing, but when you have a paramilitary force prepared to arrest or kill anyone over these plants, you are dealing with tyranny.
I am not advocating that anyone do anything illegal. So, in a strictly hypothetical sense, just imagine if the response to that was an underground campaign to scatter marijuana seeds all over the private properties of the police chief (or sheriff), various local government officials, state government officials, their friends and families, their staff, local judges, important local businessmen, etc.
It could at least change the "indiscriminately arresting with no regard for whether deliberate cultivation
Re:Police will be ordering this soon (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't work this way. When they find the plants on the property of the official with the government connections, they won't arrest anyone and the local prosecutor will quietly decline to file charges. Nor will they do any civil forfeitures.
And when they find the exact same plants on the property of the hispanic/black guy's property, or that redneck fellow who has already had a few run ins with the law, that's when they slam on the cuffs and knock the suspect around a bit. And charge him with a crime, and take his property.
It will never even occur to the government officials doing this that what they are doing is hippo-critical. After all, they "know" the black/hispanic/white trash guy must be guilty of something, even if not this particular thing. And they "know" that judge or police chief is innocent or a good guy that deserves a break, even if the pot garden looks deliberately cultivated.
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Only if actual children are involved. Connected government officials aren't immune to being brought down by scandal, just highly resistant to it.
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It will never even occur to the government officials doing this that what they are doing is hippo-critical.
No one ever thinks about how the hippos will feel, they just criticize them.
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Here's a fix for that?
Seed balls. [wikipedia.org] Just start walking around the neighborhood with a bag of these, tossing them into gardens, planters and median strips. Be especially sure to put them in the large planters you find in front of banks and other public buildings. Make sure you wear jeans, boots, hard hat and orange vest, so you look like a worker.
Do this all over the place. Everywhere. Towns, cities, villages, technical parks; anywhere there is a planter or bare soil. Do it at night, and you can see enti
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http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/ [drugwarrant.com]
That is why I wrote, "Arrest or kill" -- sometimes they have enough restraint not to use their assault rifles, and then other times they lack that restraint and wind up killing bystanders, children, and their targets.
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Yay, integrate it into surveillance cams!
Tricorders next! (Score:4, Interesting)
Who would want a tricorder that couldn't do spectral analysis? We're almost there!
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About damn time (Score:3)
Forgive the pedantry, but.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Cannabis sativa is Cannabis sativa. The fact that they have different THC levels does not make them different plants anymore than a the height of a Chihuahua makes it any less of a dog than a Great Dane.
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I guess you've never heard of Ruderalis.
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Now, even if the law doesn't differentiate between different potencies of cannabis, law enforcement
smoke at least ten times as much (Score:2)
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yeah, you can get drunk on angostura bitters from the supermarket too, yet you aren't carded for it.
For a "technology" website (Score:3)
There's always about 80% of commenters here whining about how new technology is going to ruin our lives.
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No. Irrational laws do.
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No, a public that doesn't get involved does.
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The public's educated all right. Hearst put years into educating the public, even invented a new word as people would never of believed the stories if it starred hemp.
Today a surprising number of people believe that marijuana is very bad and worth locking people up over all due to the way they've been educated. The press has a lot of power especially when working in hand with the government.
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It takes people who know about technology to spot the ways a technology can be abused.
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Slashdot hasn't been a technology website for a long time. It's a site for libertarians and anarchists to complain about how the evil gubmint is out to get them (while Apple and Android fanbois chatter in the background). Now, in fairness, the government does overreach in a lot of cases -- the war on drugs being chiefest among them. But it's a mistake to ascribe those actions to evil motives rather than the far more likely ones of pandering, desperation, and good ole fashioned incompetence. The sad thin
Pfft! Who needs "smart technology" for that? (Score:2)
Hyperspectral Imaging (Score:1)
From TFA:
The system-on-chip (SoC) solution can accurately distinguish between objects that appear virtually identical using traditional red-green-blue imaging chips.
The sentence immediately preceding that one, claims the product senses outside the visual spectrum ("hyper-spectral") and that it can perform remote spectral analysis, but somehow it uses just a good ol' RGB sensor.
Re:Hyperspectral Imaging (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
The system-on-chip (SoC) solution can accurately distinguish between objects that appear virtually identical using traditional red-green-blue imaging chips.
The sentence immediately preceding that one, claims the product senses outside the visual spectrum ("hyper-spectral") and that it can perform remote spectral analysis, but somehow it uses just a good ol' RGB sensor.
Yes, it says that it can differentiate things that a traditional RGB sensor cannot. That means it's NOT a "good ol' RGB sensor".
Color cameras are just black and white ones with a set of filters over the pixels. Traditional color cameras use red, green and blue filters in a Bayer pattern. You can make a "hyperspectral" camera by using narrower filters of specific wavelengths to detect light at those wavelengths. For example, if you know that corn and someone else differ at a certain wavelength, use a filter at that wavelength.
You can also make a hyperspectral line imager by using a slit instead of a round aperture and putting a grating or prism behind it. That turns the slit image into a two-D "image" where the slit is broken down by color. One dimension is along the line, the second is by color. Move the camera so the slit covers the desired imaging area and record the spectrum at each "pixel" in the resulting image. Google for "CAP" and "Archer".
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Well, shit (Score:5, Funny)
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You can just switch to paper bags. They're good for the environment too!
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Yeah..paper bags are just great for the environment~
do people know know what goes into makes and recycling paper? Nastier then plastic.
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i've suspected this for a while, but i don't really know how to start researching it; googling yields too much noise and propaganda. do you have any links/cites/summaries?
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I hear the market for individual ounces of powdered laundry detergent is booming.
Must be all those business travelers needing to do laundry.
Better Link (Score:5, Informative)
Here is another article [physicstoday.org], which is both more informative, and doesn't have an annoying constantly scrolling twitter feed to distract you while you try to read.
I can tell you the difference for free (Score:2)
Uh, what? (Score:2)
Read the article. This might be able to tell weed from tobacco in the field, but not covered over by paper; it has no penetrative power. (Neither application is mentioned in the article, by the way.)
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They may be thinking about detecting pot smokers in a crowd by doing a spectro analysis of the smoke. In my day we did the same thing... with our eyes.
rubycodez (Score:2)
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The guys with guns are a subtle clue.
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Re:rubycodez (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
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+1 Pink Floyd reference
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Summary example not in article (Score:4, Interesting)
What are they talking about? The article says absolutely nothing about differentiating hand-rolled cigarettes, nothing about tobacco, and nothing about marijuana.
burned (Score:2)
I wish there was a camera to tell oregano from marijuana. That little sophomore shit at the high school in my neighborhood sold me fugazi again.
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If a quick sniff won't tell you the difference between grass and oregano, you are probably way too high already....
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I'b cot a code and my nose is stupped up.
Even better: (Score:2)
Would be a smart camera that can tell when a summary on slashdot includes information found nowhere within TFA.
That Would Have Been Useful 30-odd Years Ago... (Score:2)
...to tell the difference between oregano and weed!
Thieving dealers...
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Get a sense of humour.
Some facts (Score:5, Insightful)
The Burden of Tobacco Use
Tobacco use is the single most preventable cause of disease, disability, and death in the United States. Each year, an estimated 443,000 people die prematurely from smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke, and another 8.6 million live with a serious illness caused by smoking. Despite these risks, approximately 46.6 million U.S. adults smoke cigarettes. Smokeless tobacco, cigars, and pipes also have deadly consequences, including lung, larynx, esophageal, and oral cancers.
http://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/publications/aag/osh.htm
I tried to find the article they had on deaths caused by marijuana, but they don't have one. Lucky we've got this new fancy new camera to make sure the American people are smoking the right stuff.
Astronomy (Score:2)
Could be interesting for Amateur Astronomers?
Timothy, What The Fuck? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't usually complain about the editors; they do a good enough job that the site is still useful by its community and conversation. But in this case I'm making an exception.
Timothy, did you even click through to the article AT ALL? I did, and it doesn't mention marijuana, cigarettes, or anything similar. The article just says that the camera does chemical composition, and it's not entirely clear that it could even do what's suggested in your summary.
Can we have a "No Original Research" rule like Wikipedia, please? It's great that you have your theories, editors, and they're completely welcome, but POST THEM AS COMMENTS. The summary spot is supposed to be a summary of the the fine article(s), and not much more; especially not your "educated guesses" presented as fact.
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Perhaps that is the desired effect: Stop people from growing marijuana by creating a strong correlation "growing marijuana" "stoners climbing over your fence".
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All that's new is SoC. The challenge with stopping hemp cultivation isn't a detection problem, it's an enforcement one.
It's just that crimes with a victim are so much more likely to be reported.