We present AutoWitness, a system to deter, detect, and track personal property theft, improve historically dismal stolen property recovery rates, and disrupt stolen property distribution networks. A property owner embeds a small tag inside the asset to be protected, where the tag lies dormant until it detects vehicular movement. Once moved, the tag uses inertial sensor-based dead reckoning to estimate position changes, but to reduce integration errors, the relative position is reset whenever the sensors indicate the vehicle has stopped. The sequence of movements, stops, and turns are logged in compact form and eventually transferred to a server using a cellular modem after both sufficient time has passed (to avoid detection) and RF power is detectable (hinting cellular access may be available). Eventually, the trajectory data are sent to a server which attempts to match a path to the observations. The algorithm uses a Hidden Markov Model of city streets and Viterbi decoding to estimate the most likely path. The proposed design leverages low-power radios and inertial sensors, is immune to intransit cloaking, and supports post hoc path reconstruction. Our prototype demonstrates technical viability of the design; the volume market forces driving machine-to-machine communications will soon make the design economically viable.

We present AutoWitness, a system to deter, detect, and track personal property theft, improve historically dismal stolen property recovery rates, and disrupt stolen property distribution networks. A property owner embeds a small tag inside the asset to be protected, where the tag lies dormant until it detects vehicular movement. Once moved, the tag uses inertial sensor-based dead reckoning to estimate position changes, but to reduce integration errors, the relative position is reset whenever the sensors indicate the vehicle has stopped. The sequence of movements, stops, and turns are logged in compact form and eventually transferred to a server using a cellular modem after both sufficient time has passed (to avoid detection) and RF power is detectable (hinting cellular access may be available). Eventually, the trajectory data are sent to a server which attempts to match a path to the observations. The algorithm uses a Hidden Markov Model of city streets and Viterbi decoding to estimate the most likely path. The proposed design leverages low-power radios and inertial sensors, is immune to intransit cloaking, and supports post hoc path reconstruction. Our prototype demonstrates technical viability of the design; the volume market forces driving machine-to-machine communications will soon make the design economically viable.

The AutoWitness project aims to deter, detect, and track theft of everyday objects using a combination of ultra low-power mobile tags and a wide-area network of static anchors. Key research challenges include dramatically driving down the cost and size of tags and increasing their lifetime, discriminating between normal activities and theft using motion detection and classification algorithms, reconstructing getaway trajectories from sparse anchor rendezvous, and ensuring sufficient coverage and connectivity in a sparse, wide-area network of anchors. The demonstration will show AutoWitness in operation including motion detection, classifying theft signatures, and tracking the trajectories of "stolen" objects near the conference venue.