Monitoring of public and private sites is increasingly becoming a very important and critical issue, especially after the recent flurry of terrorist attacks including the one on the Word Trade Center in September 2001. It is, therefore, imperative that effective multisensor surveillance systems be developed to protect the society from similar attacks in the future. The new generation of surveillance systems to be developed have a specific requirement: they must be able to automatically identify criminal and terrorist activity without sacrificing individual privacy to the extent possible. Privacy laws concerning monitoring and surveillance systems vary from country to country but, in general, they try to protect the privacy of their citizens. Monitoring and visual surveillance has numerous other applications. It can be employed to help invalids or handicapped and to monitor the activities of elderly people. It can be used to monitor large events such as sporting events, as well. Nowadays, monitoring is employ d in several different contexts including transport applications, such as monitoring of railway stations and airports, dangerous environments like nuclear facilities or traffic flows on roads and bridges. The latest generation of surveillance systems mainly rely on hybrid analog-digital, or completely digital video communications and processing methods and take advantage of the greater of flexibility offered by video processing algorithms that are capable focusing a human operator's attention on a set of interesting situations.

Advanced Video-Based Surveillance Systems presents second generation surveillance systems that automatically process large sets of signals for performance monitoring tasks. Included is coverage of different architecture designs, customization of surveillance architecture for end-users, advances in the processing of imaging sequences, security systems, sensors, and remote monitoring projects. Examples are provided of surveillance applications in highway traffic control, subway stations, wireless communications, and other areas. This work will be of interest to researchers in image processing, computer vision, digital signal processing, and telecommunications.

The latest generation of visual surveillance systems have adopted recent technological developments in acquisition and communications. These advances have not so much changed the nature of surveillance as extended its reach and reliability. Fundamentally, systems remain relatively unintelligent with human operators remaining central to the threat assessment and response planning procedures found in CCTV installations. Nonetheless, the availability of high-performance computing platforms will ensure that cycle-hungry intellectual property gestating in academic and industrial research programs will have a major impact on the next generation of products. Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Computer Vision and Distributed Processing, surveys works in progress in laboratories from around the world. The first part of the book present the most recent trends in the industrial world including real-time systems for monitoring of indoor and outdoor environments, society infrastructures such as subways and motorways, retail stores and aerial surveillance. Part Two explores current best practices in a chain of algorithms required to perform robust and accurate real-time tracking for motion detection involving rapid and frequent lighting changes, the establishment of accurate temporally consistent object trajectories particularly in crowded scenes, and the classification of object types. Part Three contains contributions which attempt to analyze events unfolding in a monitored scheme. The last part reviews distributed intelligent architectures which are likely to exploit three key recent technological developments in light-weight distributed computing methodologies, and intelligent sensors. Sucharchitectures, in which signal analysis is moving towards sensing devices, can exploit the reduced bandwidth requirements of transmitting knowledge rather than pixels. Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Computer Vision and Distributed Processing provides timely information for professionals working in the areas of surveillance, image processing, computer vision, digital signal processing and telecommunications.

Multimedia surveillance systems is an emerging field that includes signal and image processing, communications, and computer vision. Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, combines the most recent research results from these areas for use by engineers and end-users involved in the design of surveillance systems in the fields of transportation and services. The book covers emerging surveillance requirements, including new digital sensors for real-time acquisition of surveillance data, low-level image processing algorithms, and event detection methods. It also discusses problems related to knowledge representation in surveillance systems, wireless and wired multimedia networks, and a new generation of surveillance communication tools. Timely information is presented on digital watermarking, broadband multimedia transmission, legal use of surveillance systems, performance evaluation criteria, and other new and emerging topics, along with applications for transports and pedestrian monitoring. The information contained in Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, bridges the distance between present practice and research findings, and the book is an indispensable reference tool for professional engineers.

Monitoring of public and private sites is increasingly becoming a very important and critical issue, especially after the recent flurry of terrorist attacks including the one on the Word Trade Center in September 2001. It is, therefore, imperative that effective multisensor surveillance systems be developed to protect the society from similar attacks in the future. The new generation of surveillance systems to be developed have a specific requirement: they must be able to automatically identify criminal and terrorist activity without sacrificing individual privacy to the extent possible. Privacy laws concerning monitoring and surveillance systems vary from country to country but, in general, they try to protect the privacy of their citizens. Monitoring and visual surveillance has numerous other applications. It can be employed to help invalids or handicapped and to monitor the activities of elderly people. It can be used to monitor large events such as sporting events, as well. Nowadays, monitoring is employ d in several different contexts including transport applications, such as monitoring of railway stations and airports, dangerous environments like nuclear facilities or traffic flows on roads and bridges. The latest generation of surveillance systems mainly rely on hybrid analog-digital, or completely digital video communications and processing methods and take advantage of the greater of flexibility offered by video processing algorithms that are capable focusing a human operator's attention on a set of interesting situations.

Multimedia surveillance systems is an emerging field that includes signal and image processing, communications, and computer vision. Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, combines the most recent research results from these areas for use by engineers and end-users involved in the design of surveillance systems in the fields of transportation and services. The book covers emerging surveillance requirements, including new digital sensors for real-time acquisition of surveillance data, low-level image processing algorithms, and event detection methods. It also discusses problems related to knowledge representation in surveillance systems, wireless and wired multimedia networks, and a new generation of surveillance communication tools. Timely information is presented on digital watermarking, broadband multimedia transmission, legal use of surveillance systems, performance evaluation criteria, and other new and emerging topics, along with applications for transports and pedestrian monitoring. The information contained in Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, bridges the distance between present practice and research findings, and the book is an indispensable reference tool for professional engineers.

Monitoring of public and private sites has increasingly become a very sensitive issue resulting in a patchwork of privacy laws varying from country to country -though all aimed at protecting the privacy of the citizen. It is important to remember, however, that monitoring and vi sual surveillance capabilities can also be employed to aid the citizen. The focus of current development is primarily aimed at public and cor porate safety applications including the monitoring of railway stations, airports, and inaccessible or dangerous environments. Future research effort, however, has already targeted citizen-oriented applications such as monitoring assistants for the aged and infirm, route-planning and congestion-avoidance tools, and a range of environment al monitoring applications. The latest generation of surveillance systems has eagerly adopted re cent technological developments to produce a fully digital pipeline of digital image acquisition, digital data transmission and digital record ing. The resultant surveillance products are highly-fiexihle, capahle of generating forensic-quality imagery, and ahle to exploit existing Internet and wide area network services to provide remote monitoring capability.

Advanced Video-Based Surveillance Systems presents second generation surveillance systems that automatically process large sets of signals for performance monitoring tasks. Included is coverage of different architecture designs, customization of surveillance architecture for end-users, advances in the processing of imaging sequences, security systems, sensors, and remote monitoring projects. Examples are provided of surveillance applications in highway traffic control, subway stations, wireless communications, and other areas. This work will be of interest to researchers in image processing, computer vision, digital signal processing, and telecommunications.