Visual Surveillance in Retail Stores and in the Home

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of video surveillance activities at Philips Research USA, which serves as a research arm of Philips Communications, Security and Imaging, a global leader in the design and manufacture of advanced automatic security systems. We concentrate on two application domains: professional security market, with emphasis on retail monitoring, and a low-cost, automated residential security. The main application for pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras is typically tracking of intruders throughout the facility. In addition, camera calibration is an important capability, because it allows geometric reasoning with respect to the floor plan as well as enhanced control of the camera. Another major component of our work concerns video content analysis, the detection of security related objects and events from video. The system typically processes video in real-time and can provide immediate alarms to alert the security operator. Relevant information is also stored in a database so that it can be efficiently retrieved later. The third and final topic discussed in the paper is a residential monitoring application, namely an intruder detection system. We describe detection of moving objects robust to changes in lighting and an object classification scheme based on radial-basis networks.