Closed Circuit Television Surveillance Research Articles

An Automatic Shoplifting Detection from Surveillance Videos (Student Abstract)

The use of closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance devices is increasing every year to prevent abnormal behaviors, including shoplifting. However, damage from shoplifting is also increasing every year. Thus, there is a need for intelligent CCTV surveillance systems that ensure the integrity of shops, despite workforce shortages. In this study, we propose an automatic detection system of shoplifting behaviors from surveillance videos. Instead of extracting features from the whole frame, we use the Region of Interest (ROI) optical-flow fusion network to highlight the necessary features more accurately.

Anxious individuals predict the onset of aggression earlier in a CCTV surveillance task.

Attentional biases in anxious individuals can facilitate the detection of threatening stimuli. A particular field of research that may benefit from enhanced threat detection is in closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance, in which operators search through multiple camera feeds to attempt to identify threatening situations before they occur. The present study examined whether the enhanced threat detection of anxious individuals extends to the ability to detect threat in a multiple-scene CCTV task. Anxiety was measured in a nonclinical sample using the State-Trait Inventory for Cognitive and Somatic Anxiety. Participants were asked to try to find aggressive incidents that were simulated using the game Grand Theft Auto V in displays showing 1, 4, or 9 simultaneous videos. The results revealed that higher levels of trait cognitive, state cognitive, and trait somatic anxiety were related to earlier responses, with no change in confidence or accuracy. Increasing the number of screens to be monitored was associated with detecting the events later and a reduced confidence in responses. These results suggest that, in nonclinical populations, a moderate degree of anxiety may be beneficial in predicting acts of aggression during CCTV monitoring tasks. Trait (i.e., stable) levels of anxiety may inform recruitment of operators for surveillance tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

CCTV surveillance for crime prevention

Research SummaryWe report on the findings of an updated systematic review and meta‐analysis of the effects of closed‐circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras on crime. The findings show that CCTV is associated with a significant and modest decrease in crime. The largest and most consistent effects of CCTV were observed in car parks. The results of the analysis also demonstrated evidence of significant crime reductions within other settings, particularly residential areas. CCTV schemes incorporating active monitoring generated larger effect sizes than did passive systems. Schemes deploying multiple interventions alongside CCTV generated larger effect sizes than did schemes deploying single or no other interventions alongside CCTV.Policy ImplicationsThe results of this systematic review—based on 40 years of evaluation research—lend support for the continued use of CCTV to prevent crime as well as reveal a greater understanding of some of the key mechanisms of effective use. Of particular salience is the continued need for CCTV to be narrowly targeted on vehicle crimes and property crime and not be deployed as a “stand‐alone” crime prevention measure. As CCTV surveillance continues to expand its reach in both public and private space and evolve with new technology, policy will benefit from high‐quality evaluations of outcomes and implementation.

A Longitudinal Quasi-Experimental Study of Violence and Disorder Impacts of Urban CCTV Camera Clusters

Methodological challenges have hampered a number of previous studies into the crime reduction effectiveness of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance systems. These have included the use of arbitrary fixed distances to represent estimated camera deterrence areas and a lack of control for camera sites with overlapping surveillance areas. The current article overcomes the first of these challenges by using camera view areas individually constructed by researchers viewing and manipulating cameras to determine precise camera viewsheds. The second challenge is addressed by grouping cameras into clusters of combined viewshed areas. The longitudinal crime and disorder reduction effectiveness of these clusters of overlapping CCTV cameras is tested in Philadelphia, PA. Multilevel mixed-effects models with time-varying covariates and measures from a noncomparable control area are applied to 10 years of crime data (2003–2012) within the viewsheds of 86 CCTV cameras grouped into 13 clusters. Models applied across violent street felonies and disorder incidents find no significant impact associated with the introduction of CCTV surveillance. Potential reasons for this are discussed.

Information processing challenges and research directions in CCTV surveillance

The aim of this paper is to review research on the cognitive processes involved in closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance, and make recommendations for further research and for practitioners. CCTV provides a socially relevant context for visual attention and search, because it involves dynamic natural images, multiple cameras that are frequently expected to be monitored simultaneously and a range of significant events which are often accompanied by high levels of uncertainty. In recent years, increasing research attention has been paid to operators’ cognitive processes in CCTV surveillance. Prior to this, the focus was largely on evaluations of systems for the purposes of developing guidelines for system design. The literature review identified 56 relevant documents. These are discussed in terms of the purpose of CCTV surveillance, the design of the technical system, nature of images, scenes and significant events, and the implications for information processing by operators. Recommendations for future research include, amongst others, context specific research, search strategies and scanning patterns, mechanisms for re-engaging attention after task disengagement, the contribution of active visual analysis, behavioural cues that predict aberrant behaviour. Specific recommendations for practitioners are made regarding translating research findings into practice and enhancing the cognitive surveillance skills of operators.

Conditional effects of open-street closed-circuit television (CCTV) on crime: A case from Korea

Prior studies reported mixed findings concerning the effects of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) on crime reduction. By utilizing the multi-contextual criminal opportunity theory, this study aims to determine the conditional effects of open-street CCTV surveillance system on crime across socioeconomic and physical environmental factors. Using the data from one district in Seoul, Korea, we ran a series of Poisson regression models with interaction terms allowed for articulating the conditional effects of CCTVs on crime. In line with studies in Western countries, CCTVs in Korea were significantly associated with levels of property crime and the areas with larger surveillance zones had lower property crime levels. Also, there was a conditional crime reduction effect of CCTVs on assaults, depending on the areal density of alcohol outlets. The conditional effect of CCTVs suggests some neighborhood characteristics optimize the deployment of CCTVs, which guide more effective implementation of CCTV systems for crime control and prevention.

CCTV Observation: The Effects of Event Type and Instructions on Fixation Behaviour in an Applied Change Blindness Task

SummaryLittle is known about how observers' scanning strategies affect performance when monitoring events in closed‐circuit television (CCTV) footage. We examined the fixation behaviour of change detectors and non‐detectors monitoring dynamic scenes. One hundred forty‐seven participants observed mock CCTV videos featuring either a mock crime or no crime. Participants were instructed to look for a crime, to look for something unusual or simply to watch the video. In both videos, two of the people depicted switched locations. Eye movements (the number of fixations on the targets and the average length of each fixation on targets) were recorded prior to and during the critical change period. Change detection (24% overall) was unaffected by event type or task instruction. Fixation behaviour differed significantly between the criminal and non‐criminal event conditions. There was no effect of instructions on fixation behaviour. Change detectors fixated for longer on the target directly before the change than did non‐detectors. Although fixation behaviour before change predicted change detection, fixation count and durations during the critical change period did not. These results highlight the potential value of studying fixation behaviour for understanding change blindness during complex, cognitively demanding tasks (e.g. CCTV surveillance). Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Value of CCTV Surveillance Cameras as an Investigative Tool: An Empirical Analysis

There has been extensive research on the value of closed-circuit television (CCTV) for preventing crime, but little on its value as an investigative tool. This study sought to establish how often CCTV provides useful evidence and how this is affected by circumstances, analysing 251,195 crimes recorded by British Transport Police that occurred on the British railway network between 2011 and 2015. CCTV was available to investigators in 45% of cases and judged to be useful in 29% (65% of cases in which it was available). Useful CCTV was associated with significantly increased chances of crimes being solved for all crime types except drugs/weapons possession and fraud. Images were more likely to be available for more-serious crimes, and less likely to be available for cases occurring at unknown times or in certain types of locations. Although this research was limited to offences on railways, it appears that CCTV is a powerful investigative tool for many types of crime. The usefulness of CCTV is limited by several factors, most notably the number of public areas not covered. Several recommendations for increasing the usefulness of CCTV are discussed.

The arguments against camera and closed-circuit television surveillance in the homes of people with disabilities to protect from abuse and neglect

ABSTRACTThis study presents an analysis of the arguments against camera and closed-circuit television surveillance in the homes of people with disabilities to protect against abuse and neglect. Three approaches were undertaken to evaluate the evidence and arguments for camera surveillance: an integrative review of the literature, an ethical analysis, and application of a theory for technology adoption in practice. The review and analysis found no evidence that camera surveillance reliably protects people with disabilities from abuse and neglect in their homes and camera use may in fact indicate possible abuse. Such technology would additionally face significant practical and ethical barriers to successful implementation.

Real-time video traffic management for a warship combat system

In an effort to improve the channel utilization of a warship combat system (WCS), it is necessary to control and manage the large volume of video traffic by considering a strong self-similarity characteristic. We propose a new video traffic management method for the WCS that smooths the traffic of the closed-circuit television surveillance system (CSS) video and encodes the electro-optical tracking system (EOTS) video with low complexity in real time. First, to achieve global and local traffic smoothing for the CSS video traffic, a proper bandwidth allocation interval and a minimum bandwidth for the CSS video traffic must be determined. Second, due to the increased available bandwidth after traffic smoothing, more elaborate low-delay encoding is accomplished by selecting encoding modes adaptively to compress the EOTS video efficiently with high visual quality. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to control the WCS traffic to be as flat as possible and to encode the EOTS video with low delay, even in combat and emergency scenarios. Hence, we show that to migrate to network-centric warfare successfully, the proposed method is much more suitable for the WCS than conventional video traffic management.

Work exposure and vigilance decrements in closed circuit television surveillance

The aim of this study was to examine operator effectiveness in terms of detection rates and potential vigilance decrements in a proactive or real time CCTV surveillance task. The study was conducted in two stages. During stage one, 42 operators who were employed full-time in CCTV surveillance observed a 90-min video and were required to detect four types of target behaviours. No vigilance decrement was found for this sample as a whole. Stage two involved collecting additional data from 31 novices and dividing the existing operators into two sub-samples, consisting of generalists and specialists depending on the type of surveillance they performed at work (total N = 73). Fifty percent of target behaviours were detected and false alarms were high. Vigilance decrements were found for novices and generalists, but specialists maintained their performance for the first hour and then increased it. Results are discussed in terms of surveillance background, work exposure, transfer of learning, selection, training and motivation and the impact of these on vigilance and CCTV performance.

Task disengagement and implications for vigilance performance in CCTV surveillance

This research examines the relationship between behavioural indicators of task disengagement and vigilance performance for closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance operators and novices in a proactive real-world detection task. Seventy-three participants (42 CCTV operators and 31 novices) performed a 90-min CCTV video surveillance task based on asset protection footage in a heavy industry. The study showed a range of individualised responses in managing attention resources in order to deal with vigilance demands. Alternating fluctuations between task engagement and disengagement were found for the majority of participants, indicating efforts to manage attention resources and cope with vigilance demands. Almost a quarter of the sample disengaged during the first 30 min, but a third showed no behavioural indicators of disengagement during the task. Different results were obtained for participants with different types of work exposure (novices and operators from either `generalist' or `specialist' CCTV surveillance operations). Task disengagement was associated with lower detection rates. The implications of task engagement theory and behavioural indictors of task disengagement for the measurement and management of vigilance performance are discussed.

What Happens When You Can’t Press Pause? The Effect of Interruptions on Detecting Threats in A Simulated Closed-Circuit Television Surveillance Feed

The present study investigated the effect of interruptions on the ability to detect and report threatening behaviors on 20-second clips of simulated low frame-rate closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage. Participants reviewed clips and were occasionally interrupted approximately halfway through and asked to complete a secondary task for 20 seconds. When the interruption expired, participants resumed viewing the clip, either from where the clip left off or from a later point in time. An analysis of the threats reported by participants revealed that after being interrupted, threats in clips that resumed exactly where they were interrupted were more likely to be detected. If the clip resumed at a later point in time, participants were less likely to recall the threats they had observed before the interruption. This finding highlights the particularly disruptive nature of interruptions in a naturalistic setting and necessitates further investigation into how these effects can be mitigated.

PROGRESS IN COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE TO SUPPORT CCTV SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS

The development and capabilities of closed circuit television surveillance systems in association with distributed computing systems are reviewed, and the applications to various aspects of surveillance are described.

Crowdsourcing CCTV surveillance on the Internet

This article provides an exploratory overview of crowdsourced surveillance of closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage over the Internet. Although the use of CCTV in both public and private surveillance is well documented, footage is now distributed over the Internet for large crowds to monitor. This article briefly introduces the concept of crowdsourcing and explains its shift from a quasi-communitarian mode of production to a business model and crime-fighting strategy. This is followed by a review of relevant scholarly literature that provides a theoretical basis for understanding crowdsourcing as it applies to CCTV surveillance online. This article then considers four case studies of crowdsourced CCTV surveillance on the Internet. These four UK-based examples provide an overview of an emerging phenomenon of how crowds can be integrated into CCTV surveillance, ranging from identifying suspects to designating suspicious behaviour in everyday activity. This article concludes by considering the broader social risks, extending from literature on CCTV, surveillance and crowdsourced labour.

Situational Crime Prevention: A Study in Indian Context

Situational Crime Prevention [also known as SCP]is a new crime prevention technique used in the field of Criminology and Criminal justice System in this paper author tried to explain the various applications of SCP. Situational crime prevention is a crime prevention strategy that addresses specific crimes by managing, designing and manipulating the environment in a manner that seeks to increase the risk to the offender, while reducing the offender’s potential reward for committing the crime. 'Situational Crime Prevention' (SCP) is the name given by criminologists to crime prevention strategies that are aimed at reducing the criminal opportunities which arise from the routines of everyday life. Such strategies include 'hardening' of potential targets, improving surveillance of areas that might attract crime (e.g. closed circuit television surveillance), and deflecting potential offenders from settings in which crimes might occur (e.g., by limiting access of such persons to shopping malls and other locales). While there has been much research and criminological discussion of SCP, it has focused on issues of effectiveness and other technical aspects e.g., does closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance 'work', in the sense of deterring offenders or aiding in the detection of offences? The larger issues especially the ethical ones were little addressed. Situational crime prevention is a primary prevention measure. This means that it is directed at stopping crime problems before they occur. Like other primary crime prevention measures, situational prevention tends to focus on reducing crime opportunities rather than on the characteristics of criminals or potential criminals.

Efficient and effective automated surveillance agents using kernel tricks

Many schemes have been presented over the years to develop automated visual surveillance systems. However, these schemes typically need custom equipment, or involve significant complexity and storage requirements. In this paper we present three software-based agents built using kernel machines to perform automated, real-time intruder detection in surveillance systems. Kernel machines provide a powerful data mining technique that may be used for pattern matching in the presence of complex data. They work by first mapping the raw input data onto a (often much) higher-dimensional feature space, and then clustering in the feature space instead. The reasoning is that mapping onto the (higher-dimensional) feature space enables the comparison of additional, higher-order correlations in determining patterns between the raw data points. The agents proposed here have been built using algorithms that are adaptive, portable, do not require any expensive or sophisticated components, and are lightweight and efficient having run times of the order of hundredths of a second. Through application to real image streams from a simple, run-of-the-mill closed-circuit television surveillance system, and direct quantitative performance comparison with some existing schemes, we show that it is possible to easily obtain high detection accuracy with low computational and storage complexities.

Cut to the Chase: Editing Time and Space through Closed-Circuit Television Surveillance

The UK is said to have the largest number of CCTV cameras of any European nation. These cameras have been involved in a variety of changes in UK police practices. Such changes range from new evidential practices in court cases, through access to new materials, to new questions posed regarding invasions of privacy. One unexplored area of police practices, which this paper will argue have undergone significant changes since the introduction of CCTV cameras, is police accountability. This paper will draw on recent controversies in the UK regarding police car chases to investigate the ways in which CCTV cameras have led to new and complex questions of police accountability.

The camera never lies, or does it? The dangers of taking CCTV surveillance at face value

How many of us question what we’re shown via closed circuit television (CCTV) as being the truth of a situation? Can clear and easily identifiable images be wrong? And if they are, how can you argue against the power of the recorded image from a legal standpoint? Can Human Factors help us improve surveillance for society? In this real example of improper CCTV surveillance, can CCTV always be taken at face value? The simple answer is no, but how many people accept what they’re shown without question and end up paying the penalties? This paper examines a case study where all that appeared on the CCTV image was not as it seemed. It then considers the underlying human factors issues of CCTV technologies for surveillance and the importance of understanding the fundamental human-machine interface.

Violence and surveillance in mental health wards

Abstract It is estimated that there are now over four million closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras in Britain watching our every move. The increased use of CCTV monitoring and surveillance within public areas has received much research attention, and there is now a critical body of surveillance literature on the implications of such watching within urban and street settings.