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CHAPTER 2

One Day, a Child Does Not Come Home

Here is one fictional example of how FMPS + VRAIO works. The procedure shown is only an illustration; the actual operating rules are for society to decide.

5:30 p.m. — our daughter is not home

  1. 15:10　Our daughter, in her second year of primary school, comes home from school. Her mother sees her eating a snack.
  2. About 15:40　The mother joins an online meeting, working from home.
  3. 17:30　When the meeting ends, the daughter is gone. Calls to neighbours and friends' homes do not find her.
  4. 17:45　The mother reports her missing to the police. A missing child is treated as an emergency.

The search begins: the camera in front of the house

The officer submits a search request to the FMPS system, stating the purpose (search for a missing child), the target, the time range (15:10–17:45) and the cameras concerned (the streetlight in front of the house). An independent Recorder confirms that the request complies with the rules and records it.

What the officer retrieves first is not footage but a list of the times at which the camera in front of the house detected motion — only a few kilobytes. Then the small representative image for each time is checked, one by one.

At 15:52, the daughter is seen leaving the house alone and walking east.

Following the trail, camera by camera

From here, the cameras are followed in sequence. From the next streetlight, only about ten seconds of images are retrieved, starting a few seconds before the time she appeared on the previous camera — about 3 MB per camera.

  1. 15:53　Passes the streetlight two posts further on.
  2. 15:56　Turns north at a junction. The high-resolution camera at the junction confirms it is her.
  3. 16:01　Enters a riverside park.
  4. After 16:01　She does not appear on the cameras at the park's other entrances.

The trail ends here. But this is not a failure. The fact that "she entered the park at 16:01 and has not come out" narrows the search to one park.

Found

A search team goes to the park and, at 18:20, finds the daughter in the long grass, absorbed in chasing insects.

The whole search retrieved about 100 MB of data. Every image the officer viewed is recorded individually.

Afterwards: the audit

Even in an emergency, the procedure is the same as usual. Later, an auditor reviews the records:

If the officer had viewed images unrelated to the search — for example, footage outside an acquaintance's house — that would be on record, found in the audit, and subject to sanctions.

Tracking a suspect

For a bag-snatching, the flow is the same. The suspect is followed by camera from the scene to the building they finally entered. With public space covered, a suspect's route always connects up to the point of "entered some private property". One possible rule is that, for ordinary investigations, retrieving footage requires a court warrant (Chapter 6).

This example is fictional and for explanation only. The actual procedures, whether approval is required, and how audits are conducted are decided by society through laws and ordinances. FMPS + VRAIO is a mechanism that makes it possible to verify afterwards that the agreed rules were followed.

The same flow has been demonstrated on the field-trial system in Kiryu City: Demo 1: Searching for a kidnapped child (PDF); Demo 2: Searching for a wandering older person (PDF).

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Contents

FMPS + VRAIO: Public-safety infrastructure built on streetlights, and the governance of AI outputs | Yusaku Fujii (Gunma University) and NPO e-JIKEI Network Promotion Institute
This site presents a research-stage concept; all figures are estimates.