Multimedia Surveillance Systems Research Articles

Multimedia IoT-surveillance optimization model using mobile-edge authentic computing.

Smart technologies are advancing the development of cutting-edge systems by exploring the future network. The Internet of Things (IoT) and many multimedia sensors interact with each other for collecting and transmitting visual data. However, managing enormous amounts of data from numerous network devices is one of the main research challenges. In this context, various IoT systems have been investigated and have provided efficient data retrieval and processing solutions. For multimedia systems, however, controlling inefficient bandwidth utilization and ensuring timely transmission of vital information are key research concerns. Moreover, to transfer multimedia traffic while balancing communication costs for the IoT system, a sustainable solution with intelligence in real-life applications is demanded. Furthermore, trust must be formed for technological advancement to occur; such an approach provides the smart communication paradigm with the incorporation of edge computing. This study proposed a model for optimizing multimedia using a combination of edge computing intelligence and authentic strategies. Mobile edges analyze network states to discover the system's status and minimize communication disruptions. Moreover, direct and indirect authentication determines the reliability of data forwarders and network stability. The proposed authentication approach minimizes the possibility of data compromise and increases trust in multimedia surveillance systems. Using simulation testing, the proposed model outperformed other comparable work in terms of byte delivery, packet overhead, packet delay, and data loss metrics.

Radar Data Fusion in the Stradar System

Abstract The main task of the Polish Border Guard is protection of the country’s border which requires utilization of multimedia surveillance systems automatically gathering, processing and sharing various data. The paper presents such a system developed for the Maritime Division of the Polish Border Guard within the STRADAR project and the problem of fusion of radar data in this system. The system, apart from providing communication means, gathers data from AIS, GPS and radar receivers: ARPA and SCANTER 2001. In the paper the concept of the radar data gathering in STRADAR system is provided with detailed presentation of radar servers, Radar INT modules and a reduplication (fusion) module and the proposition of the algorithm for radar data fusion.

Stradar — Multimedia Dispatcher and Teleinformation System for the Border Guard

Abstract Security of national borders requires utilization of multimedia surveillance systems automatically gathering, processing and sharing various data. The paper presents such a system developed for the Maritime Division of the Polish Border Guard within the STRADAR project. The system, apart from providing communication means, gathers data, such as map data from AIS, GPS and radar receivers, videos and photos from camera or audio from phone calls and SMS messages, from multiple mobile units and stationary points located along the coastline. All gathered data can be visualized on a multidisplay by the personnel that can dynamically select presented data and configure form of presentation. The paper describes system functionalities, its hardware and software implementation, and presents results of acceptance tests that the system have recently passed.

Gaussian filter for TDOA based sound source localization in multimedia surveillance

Although multimedia surveillance systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our living environment, automated multimedia surveillance systems based on video camera lacks the robustness and reliability most of the time in several real applications. To overcome this drawback, audio sensory devices have been taken into account in a considerable amount of research. For example, Sound Source Localization (SSL) may indicate potential security risks and could point the camera in that direction. In this paper, a reliable sound source localization based on Time-Difference-Of-Arrival (TDOA) is explored. The novel aspect of our approach includes a TDOA based Gaussian filter to improve the accuracy and stability of sound source localization. The advantage of our proposed algorithm is its extensive integration with various TDOA-based methods in all kinds of microphone array. The Experimental comparison shows significant improvement over the state of the art TDOA-based algorithm.

Secure privacy vault design for distributed multimedia surveillance system

Distributed multimedia surveillance systems utilize heterogeneous sensors such as cameras, motion sensors, sound sensors, and RFID in order to provide safety and security to people. However, due to the potential of exposing privacy by these systems, many people are reluctant to be electronically monitored and suffer from privacy loss. In order to overcome this dilemma, the current surveillance systems should adopt improved privacy preservation (i.e. hiding people’s face) mechanism while they are used for typical surveillance tasks. This paper takes a holistic approach to identify the different privacy leakage channels in the distributed video surveillance context and proposes the design of a secure privacy vault to conceal privacy-sensitive data obtained from distributed visual sensors. It also shows how the proposed solution helps to mitigate the potential privacy leakage problems at different levels of the leakage channels. In order to demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach, we further provide the privacy leakage attack model as well as the security analysis of the proposed solution.

Framework for a Cloud-Based Multimedia Surveillance System

The new generation of multimedia surveillance systems integrates a large number of heterogeneous sensors to collect, process, and analyze multimedia data for identifying events of potential security threats. Some of the major concerns facing these systems are scalability, ubiquitous access to sensory data, event processing overhead, and massive storage requirements—all of which demand novel scalable approach. Cloud computing can provide a powerful and scalable infrastructure for large-scale storage, processing, and dissemination of sensor data. Furthermore, the integration of sensor technology and cloud computing offers new possibilities for efficient development and deployment of sensor-based systems. This paper proposes a framework for a cloud-based multimedia surveillance system and highlights several research and technical issues. A prototype surveillance system is also designed and analyzed in the context of the proposed surveillance framework. The paper finally reports that cloud-based multimedia surveillance system can effectively support the processing overload, storage requirements, ubiquitous access, security, and privacy in large-scale surveillance settings.

Guest editorial: Advances in multimedia surveillance

Automated multimedia surveillance systems capture, process and analyze multimedia data coming from heterogeneous sensors. These systems are often designed to support (semi-) automatic decision making, such as generating an alarm in response to a surveillance event, as well as providing useful information to human decision makers to ensure public safety. Various tools and techniques from different fields such as Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, and Multimedia Computing have contributed to the success of such systems. Although there has been significant progress in the field of multimedia surveillance research, we still face situations when the system is unable to detect critical events, wrongly identifies individuals or generates false alarms leading to undesired consequences. Hence, the goal of this special issue is to bring forward recent advancements in automated multimedia surveillance for improved public safety. More specifically, it reports the state-of-the-art techniques, methodologies and systems for automatic surveillance aiming to protect people and ensure their safety. An open call for papers attracted 16 submissions addressing different aspects of multimedia surveillance systems. After a thorough and highly competitive review process, the guest editorial committee recommended the acceptance of 11 top quality papers, though most submissions were of high quality. The accepted papers

Utility based decision support engine for camera view selection in multimedia surveillance systems

Design and implementation of an effective surveillance system is a challenging task. In practice, a large number of CCTV cameras are installed to prevent illegal and unacceptable activities where a human operator observes different camera views and identifies various alarming cases. But reliance on the human operator for real-time response can be expensive as he may be unable to pay full attention to all camera views at the same time. Moreover, the complexity of a situation may not be easily perceivable by the operator for which he might require additional support in response to an adverse situation. In this paper, we present a Decision Support Engine (DSE) to select and schedule most appropriate camera views that can help the operator to take an informed decision. For this purpose, we devise a utility based approach where the utility value changes based on automatically detected events in different surveillance zones, event co-relation, and operator's feedback. In addition to the selected camera views, we propose to synthetically embed extra information around the camera views such as event summary and suggested action plan to globally perceive the current situation. The experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed decision support system.

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

OS-Guard: on-site signature based framework for multimedia surveillance data management

This paper presents OS-Guard(On-Site Guard), a novel on-site signature based framework for multimedia surveillance data management. One of the major concerns in widespread deployment of multimedia surveillance systems is the enormous amount of data collected from multiple media streams that need to be communicated, observed and stored for crime alerts and forensic analysis. This necessitates investigating efficient data management techniques to solve this problem. This work aims to tackle this problem, motivated by the following observation, more data does not mean more information. OS-Guard is a novel framework that attempts to collect informative data and filter out non-informative data on-site, thus taking a step towards solving the data management problem. In the framework, both audio and video cues are utilized by extracting features from the incoming data stream and the resultant real valued feature data is binarized for efficient storage and processing. A feature selection process based on association rule mining selects discriminant features. A short representative sample of the whole database is generated using a novel reservoir sampling algorithm that is stored onsite and used with an support vector machine to classify an important event. Initial experiments for a Bank ATM monitoring scenario demonstrates promising results.

Design of multimedia surveillance systems

This article addresses the problem of how to select the optimal combination of sensors and how to determine their optimal placement in a surveillance region in order to meet the given performance requirements at a minimal cost for a multimedia surveillance system. We propose to solve this problem by obtaining a performance vector, with its elements representing the performances of subtasks, for a given input combination of sensors and their placement. Then we show that the optimal sensor selection problem can be converted into the form of Integer Linear Programming problem (ILP) by using a linear model for computing the optimal performance vector corresponding to a sensor combination. Optimal performance vector corresponding to a sensor combination refers to the performance vector corresponding to the optimal placement of a sensor combination. To demonstrate the utility of our technique, we design and build a surveillance system consisting of PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) cameras and active motion sensors for capturing faces. Finally, we show experimentally that optimal placement of sensors based on the design maximizes the system performance.

Special issue on multimedia Surveillance systems: guest editorial

It is with considerable pride that we present this special issue of ACM multimedia based on the presentations at the third Video Surveillance and Sensor Network workshop, in conjunction with the ACM conference in Singapore 2005. The papers were thoroughly reviewed independently of the review process for the workshop. This special issue consists of eight papers drawn from a number of areas. It appears that we are breaking new ground as explained in this issue. Whenever we say multimedia, we think of systems and services that manage heterogeneous data for human-oriented applications; human users are normally the subjects who access and use multimedia data, multimedia streams, multimedia content, and multimedia interfaces in many different applications contexts. Following this abstraction, multimedia surveillance systems would be only a surveillance system able to produce output of the task in a multimedia format, providing distilled video, images and sounds of the monitored environment, which would possibly be annotated in an efficient and standard way or possibly transcoded in another media such as text or animation, to improve further querying to surveillance stored data. Instead, the idea of multimedia surveillance systems must be enlarged. It is not only a system capable of

Information assimilation framework for event detection in multimedia surveillance systems

Most multimedia surveillance and monitoring systems nowadays utilize multiple types of sensors to detect events of interest as and when they occur in the environment. However, due to the asynchrony among and diversity of sensors, information assimilation – how to combine the information obtained from asynchronous and multifarious sources is an important and challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose a framework for information assimilation that addresses the issues – “when”, “what” and “how” to assimilate the information obtained from different media sources in order to detect events in multimedia surveillance systems. The proposed framework adopts a hierarchical probabilistic assimilation approach to detect atomic and compound events. To detect an event, our framework uses not only the media streams available at the current instant but it also utilizes their two important properties – first, accumulated past history of whether they have been providing concurring or contradictory evidences, and – second, the system designer’s confidence in them. The experimental results show the utility of the proposed framework.

Distributed architectures and logical-task decomposition in multimedia surveillance systems

In the past few years, the development of complex surveillance systems has captured the interest of both the research and industrial worlds. Strong and challenging requirements of modern society are involved in this problem, which aims to increase safety and security in several application domains such as transport, tourism, home and bank security, military applications, etc. At the same time, fast improvements in microelectronics, telecommunications, and computer science make it necessary to consider new perspectives in this field. The main objective of this paper is to investigate, discuss, and evaluate the impact of distributed processing and new communication techniques on multimedia surveillance systems, which represent the so-called third-generation surveillance systems (3 GSSs). In particular, aspects related to the distribution of intelligence among multiple-processing and wide-bandwidth resources are discussed in detail. It is shown how distribution of intelligence can be obtained by a hierarchical architecture that partitions, in a dynamic way, the main logical processing tasks (i.e., representation, recognition, and communication) performed in a 3 GSS physical architecture made up of intelligent cameras, hubs, and central control rooms. The advantages of this solution are pointed out in terms of 1) increased flexibility and reconfigurability and 2) optimal allocation of available processing and bandwidth resources. Finally, a case study is analyzed that allows one to gain a deeper insight into a distributed surveillance system.

Use of intelligent sensors and software radio technologies for optimal design of reconfigurable multimedia surveillance networks

In these last years, the increasing request for security coming from civil society led to intensive exploitation of the most advanced technological tools for solving problems related to remote monitoring of public sites. New-generation multimedia surveillance systems will be characterized by such key topics as distribution of processing capabilities among intelligent sensor and central processing levels, and dynamic reconfigurability of the wireless links thanks to innovative software radio technologies. In this work a joint analysis of such aspects is presented in order to provide optimal design strategies for new-generation multimedia surveillance networks, able to take into account the trade-offs between available computing and communications resources and required performance in terms of correct event detection and real-time processing.