Moving Pixels in Static Cameras: Detecting Dangerous Situations due to Environment or People

Abstract

SummaryDangerous situations arise in everyday life and many efforts have been lavished to exploit technology to increase the level of safety in urban areas. Video analysis is absolutely one of the most important and emerging technology for security purposes. Automatic video surveillance systems commonly analyze the scene searching for moving objects. Well known techniques exist to cope with this problem that is commonly referred as “change detection”. Every time a difference against a reference model is sensed, it should be analyzed to allow the system to discriminate among a usual situation or a possible threat. When the sensor is a camera, motion is the key element to detect changes and moving objects must be correctly classified according to their nature. In this context we can distinguish among two different kinds of threat that can lead to dangerous situations in a video-surveilled environment. The first one is due to environmental changes such as rain, fog or smoke present in the scene. This kind of phenomena are sensed by the camera as moving pixels and, subsequently as moving objects in the scene. This kind of threats shares some common characteristics such as texture, shape and color information and can be detected observing the features’ evolution in time. The second situation arises when people are directly responsible of the dangerous situation. In this case a “subject” is acting in an unusual way leading to an abnormal situation. From the sensor’s point of view, moving pixels are still observed, but specific features and time-dependent statistical models should be adopted to learn and then correctly detect unusual and dangerous behaviors. With these premises, this chapter will present two different case studies. The first one describes the detection of environmental changes in the observed scene and details the problem of reliably detecting smoke in outdoor environments using both motion information and global image features, such as color information and texture energy computed by the means of the Wavelet transform. The second refers to the problem of detecting suspicious or abnormal people behaviors by means of people trajectory analysis in a multiple cameras video-surveillance scenario. Specifically, a technique to infer and learn the concept of normality is proposed jointly with a suitable statistical tool to model and robustly compare people trajectories.