December 27, 2004
Cellphones for sleuths
Art thieves of the world, beware. Investigators may soon get a new weapon in the painstaking pursuit of stolen paintings and sculpture - a camera-equipped cellphone. By Kevin J. O'Brien for The Internatioanl Herald Tribune.
"Starting next year, Derdack, a company based in Potsdam, Germany, plans to start selling software for mobile phones that it says could revolutionize the work of art investigators.
With Derdack's software, investigators can take a photo of a suspicious painting with a cellphone or a personal digital assistant, send it wirelessly by GPRS or UMTS networks to international databases of stolen art and make a match - within seconds.
If it passes muster, Derdack's software could become a powerful tool in the fight against art theft, which Interpol says is increasing with the price of art. Across Europe, there are more than 100,000 pieces of stolen art on record, according to Interpol".
Related:
-- Police camera phones hunt graffiti - Images of etchings are captured on camera phones, emailed to police headquarters and stored in a database of graffiti tags, the trademark sign of the urban street 'artist'. Detectives can then compare them with images of spray paint vandalism in towns and cities.
-- Police test “snap trap” approach - Officers can now photograph graffiti and identify individuals responsible for multiple instances of vandalism by looking at distinctive signatures and styles. “The pictures can be emailed straight from the scene and stored on a database, a bit like fingerprints. We collect the images and can charge an individual with numerous offences rather than just one.”
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