<title>Computer vision and airport security</title>

Abstract

Research and development are in progress in signal processing for explosive detection for airport security. The recent advancements in real-time computer vision, however, will provide possibilities of far more new and innovative ways to augment airport's human security force. For example, a computer vision system with real-time object tracking capability can monitor the behavior of large groups of people, computers can keep detailed records of the flow of people through certain areas, allowing security personnel to predict and quickly respond to crowd or isolation situations, as well as identifying potential suspects through suspicious movement patterns. Further, such a system would enable airport security officers to accurately monitor a particular suspect's movements within the airport, relayed from camera to camera, without alerting him to their observation or diverting manpower from other areas. Computerized face recognition and facial expression extraction are other actively researched areas in computer vision that have potential for airport security applications. I present an overview of the state-of-the-art computer vision research than can have relevance to airport security, and discuss how they can be applied and what aspects of that technology need to be researched further before they can be put into practical application.© (1993) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.