Mobile Surveillance Research Articles

3-D relative positioning sensor for indoor flying robots

Swarms of indoor flying robots are promising for many applications, including searching tasks in collapsing buildings, or mobile surveillance and monitoring tasks in complex man-made structures. For tasks that employ several flying robots, spatial-coordination between robots is essential for achieving collective operation. However, there is a lack of on-board sensors capable of sensing the highly-dynamic 3-D trajectories required for spatial-coordination of small indoor flying robots. Existing sensing methods typically utilise complex SLAM based approaches, or absolute positioning obtained from off-board tracking sensors, which is not practical for real-world operation. This paper presents an adaptable, embedded infrared based 3-D relative positioning sensor that also operates as a proximity sensor, which is designed to enable inter-robot spatial-coordination and goal-directed flight. This practical approach is robust to varying indoor environmental illumination conditions and is computationally simple.

Generation of an Optimum Patrol Course for Mobile Surveillance Camera

Video surveillance systems are becoming increasingly important for crime investigation and deterrence, and the number of cameras installed in public space is increasing. However, many cameras installed at fixed positions are required to observe a wide and complex area. In order to efficiently observe such a wide area at lower cost, mobile robots are an attractive option. In this paper, we propose a method for determining the traveling route of a mobile surveillance camera. Our method is based on mixed integer linear programming and obtains an optimum traveling route such that a camera with a certain visual angle and visual distance can observe the entire region at the shortest intervals. Through our experiments, we apply this method to several artificially generated data and data for a real university campus and demonstrate that effective patrol courses for specified mobile surveillance cameras can be generated.

RETRACTED: Internal wave transport, nonlinear manifestation, and mixing in a stratified shear layer - technical briefs

RETRACTED: Internal wave transport, nonlinear manifestation, and mixing in a stratified shear layer - technical briefs

RETRACTED: Design, modeling and stability control for an actuated dynamic walking planar bipedal robot

RETRACTED: Design, modeling and stability control for an actuated dynamic walking planar bipedal robot

RETRACTED: Path planning for autonomous robots – a comprehensive analysis by a greedy algorithm

RETRACTED: Path planning for autonomous robots – a comprehensive analysis by a greedy algorithm

RETRACTED: Delay independent criterion for multiple time-delay systems and its application in building structure control systems

RETRACTED: Delay independent criterion for multiple time-delay systems and its application in building structure control systems

RETRACTED: Nonlinear vibration of structural deterioration in reinforced concrete columns: experimental and theoretical investigation

RETRACTED: Nonlinear vibration of structural deterioration in reinforced concrete columns: experimental and theoretical investigation

RETRACTED: Development for low-cost and cross-platform robot control environment

RETRACTED: Development for low-cost and cross-platform robot control environment

An Incentive-Based Framework for Vehicle-Based Mobile Sensing

Mobile surveillance has been recently proposed as a replacement for traditional road-side surveillance system. One important aspect of a mobile surveillance system is to decide what are the events of interest. In this work, we adopt the concept of participatory sensing for mobile surveillance by involving a human into the loop of data collection. We introduce a virtual credit based mechanism to motivate the participants to collect data and share their bandwidth. Finally, we use a large-scale real-world vehicle trace to evaluate the feasibility of our proposed framework.

Market-Based Approach to Mobile Surveillance Systems

The active surveillance of public and private sites is increasingly becoming a very important and critical issue. It is, therefore, imperative to develop mobile surveillance systems to protect these sites. Modern surveillance systems encompass spatially distributed mobile and static sensors in order to provide effective monitoring of persistent and transient objects and events in a given area of interest (AOI). The realization of the potential of mobile surveillance requires the solution of different challenging problems such as task allocation, mobile sensor deployment, multisensor management, cooperative object detection and tracking, decentralized data fusion, and interoperability and accessibility of system nodes. This paper proposes a market-based approach that can be used to handle different problems of mobile surveillance systems. Task allocation and cooperative target tracking are studied using the proposed approach as two challenging problems of mobile surveillance systems. These challenges are addressed individually and collectively.

Development and Application of a Framework for Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence in Lower Resource Settings

In 2005, World Health Organization member countries agreed to the revised International Health Regulations which require countries to detect, report, and respond to any event that may represent a public health emergency of international concern. Forecasting the risk posed by hazards, including incidents in animal populations, requires an intelligence-based approach. We propose an emerging infectious disease intelligence framework informed by literature from the fields of surveillance, epidemic intelligence, and military intelligence. This framework highlights the need for situational awareness and can be used to assess emerging infectious disease intelligence capacity in lower resource settings. To illustrate the utility of this framework we applied it to the Infectious Disease Surveillance and Analysis System, a mobile phone-based surveillance pilot project supplementing diagnostic laboratory-based surveillance in Sri Lanka. Application of the framework was feasible and useful in illuminating the strengths and deficits in the current surveillance infrastructure in Sri Lanka for emerging infectious disease early warning. The approach also demonstrated how a mobile phoned-based system could improve Sri Lanka’s emerging infectious disease intelligence capabilities. Finally, the framework allowed us to recommend steps to take in order to strengthen Sri Lanka’s emerging infectious disease early warning capacity, enabling more timely and complete identification of events in the animal population that could pose a human health risk.

The Rise of African SIM Registration: Mobility, Identity, Surveillance and Resistance

The African experience with mobile telephony has been extolled as a defining moment in the continent's contemporary economic, social, and political development. Yet SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) registration schemes are threatening to throttle the technology’s developmental potential. These mandates, which require the registration of identity information to activate a mobile SIM card, are fast becoming universal in Africa, with little to no public debate about the wider social or political effects. Whereas some authors have explored the motivations behind these drives, as well as their potential economic impacts, this paper focuses its critique on the broader diversity of implications of this regulatory transformation. Viewing SIM registration through a lens that surveillance studies and information & communication technologies for development, it examines elements of resistance across a range of actors, as well as other emerging effects like access barriers, linkages to financialization, and Africa’s budding mobile surveillance society.

RETRACTED: Applications of linear differential inclusion-based criterion to a nonlinear chaotic system: a critical review

RETRACTED: Applications of linear differential inclusion-based criterion to a nonlinear chaotic system: a critical review

RETRACTED: Structural system identification for vibration bridges using the Hilbert–Huang transform

RETRACTED: Structural system identification for vibration bridges using the Hilbert–Huang transform

RETRACTED: Applications of the fuzzy Lyapunov linear matrix inequality criterion to a chaotic structural system

RETRACTED: Applications of the fuzzy Lyapunov linear matrix inequality criterion to a chaotic structural system

RETRACTED: An enhanced obstacle avoidance and path correction mechanism for an autonomous intelligent robot with multiple sensors

RETRACTED: An enhanced obstacle avoidance and path correction mechanism for an autonomous intelligent robot with multiple sensors

RETRACTED: Applications of fuzzy control to nonlinear time-delay systems using the linear matrix inequality fuzzy Lyapunov method

RETRACTED: Applications of fuzzy control to nonlinear time-delay systems using the linear matrix inequality fuzzy Lyapunov method

Guest editorial: Privacy-aware multimedia surveillance systems

Due to the significant increase in various security threats, safety has become a primary concern for our society. As a result, most of the public places such as airports, train stations, banks, shopping malls, subways and streets are nowadays equipped with state-of-the-art multimedia surveillance systems. These systems are meant to process sensory data to automatically detect suspicious or unusual behavior of people and alert security personnel so that preventive actions can be taken. Although such surveillance infrastructure has proved to be very useful from a security perspective; there has been apprehension among people in regard to their privacy safeguards. Citizens have increasingly begun to object to being watched electronically. Hence, there is a need for preserving privacy of people yet providing them a sense of security through effective surveillance. It is worth mentioning that although there has been a significant progress in the field of surveillance research, the issues related to people’s privacy have often been overlooked in the past and have only begun to attract the attention of researchers very recently. The goal of this special issue is to bring forth the recent advances in the privacy research for multimedia surveillance. We received nine submissions from an open call for papers that address different aspects of privacy-aware multimedia surveillance systems. Although many submissions were of good quality, guest editorial committee recommended to accept only five top quality papers after a careful and highly competitive review process. These papers cover diverse issues, including privacy protection using Chaos-cryptography-based data scrambling and Markov chain algorithms, privacy filters in live surveillance video, preserving privacy in mobile video surveillance, and community-based user-specific and location-aware privacy awareness. The first paper of this special issue ‘‘User centric privacy protection in video surveillance’’ by Thomas Winkler and Bernhard Rinner presents a concept for user-centric privacy awareness in video surveillance. The proposed system follows a community-based approach and empowers monitored persons to actively participate in registering cameras using their conventional smart phones. The collected information is used to warn users of violations of their personal privacy policy. Moreover, the proposed system is scalable in terms of different levels of privacy. The second paper ‘‘A general framework for managing and processing live video data with privacy protection’’ by Alexander J. Aved and Kien A. Hua describes the live video database model with an intrinsic privacy model that provides a level of privacy protection not previously available for real-time streaming video data. The authors present the query language LVSQL, the system architecture, the object recognition and cross-camera tracking P. K. Atrey (&) Department of Applied Computer Science, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada e-mail: p.atrey@uwinnipeg.ca

RETRACTED: Review of an autonomous humanoid robot and its mechanical control

RETRACTED: Review of an autonomous humanoid robot and its mechanical control

RETRACTED: A critical review of internal wave dynamics. Part 2 – Laboratory experiments and theoretical physics

RETRACTED: A critical review of internal wave dynamics. Part 2 – Laboratory experiments and theoretical physics