At the University of Surrey's Centre for Vision, Student Zdenek Kalal has made his thesis on machine vision. He introduced his "Predator" camera system to university scrutiny, and went on to win several competitions. The camera is able to track an object and capture how it looks in different orientations and angles. Over time the Predator, software, learns more about the object and improves its over all tracking ability of the object. It can do this with faces, which makes it immediately important for security purposes. At the moment, the system works with a simple webcam.
For the curious and ambitions, you can download source code for Kalal's project at this website.
I'm sure we will see more of this technology in the near future.
Eavesdropper
