Taking the Pulse of French Intelligence
Francois Heisbourg, a well-known French strategic thinker, is currently Chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. He worked ...
Intelligence, Democratic Accountability, and the Media in France
This article examines the relationship between the media, the government, and its intelligence apparatus in contemporary France. In a country characterized by a traditionally strong state, the relationship between intelligence and the media has often been tense. The recent affaire des fadettes—in which the Central Directorate for Domestic Intelligence tapped a journalist’s phone to trace the source of an unauthorized disclosure of government information—epitomizes the precarious position of the press in France. Following recent reforms, the French system of intelligence accountability would benefit from a more collaborative relationship between the institutions of government and the media.
Automated architectural acquisition from a camera undergoing planar motion
Much recent research on structure and motion recovery has concentrated on the case of reconstruction of unstructured environments from an uncalibrated video sequence. Here we show the advantages that accrue to both the motion determination and structure recovery if constraints are available on the motion and environment. We consider the case of a camera with fixed internal parameters undergoing planar motion in an indoor environment for which several dominant directions occur. The novelty of this work is that it is shown that under these constraints the problems of both motion determination and 3D structure recovery can be reduced to a sequence of one parameter searches. This low dimensional search enables efficient, robust and reliable algorithms to be engineered. The resulting algorithms are demonstrated on images of very visually impoverished scenes, and the results are compared to ground truth.