Image Analysis for Advanced Video Surveillance

Abstract

More and more cameras are available on the market and their prices continuously decrease. This cost effectiveness lets a video surveillance system be easily adopted. Moreover the spread of cameras for surveillance purposes increases dramatically the visual data to be analyzed. The great amount of visual material to be viewed and the limit of the human attention in front of a monitor require automatic methods to interpret the content of surveillance video sequences. Because of the variety of scenarios, an automatic system has to behave differently according to the particular application. In the case of surveillance of banks, for instance, an intrusion has to be detected. Consequently the system is expected to generate an alarm for the intervention of a human operator. In the case of highway surveillance, on the other hand, the target is to compute statistics about the traffic and to generate alarms in case of an emergency or anomalous situations. The events leading to an alarm are of different nature, i.e. an accident, a traffic jam, a vehicle stopped on the emergency lane.