A System for Video Surveillance and Monitoring The thrust of CMU research under the DARPA Video Surveillance and Monitoring (VSAM) project is cooperative multi-sensor surveillance to support battlefield awareness. Under our VSAM Integrated Feasibility Demonstration (IFD) contract, we have developed automated video understanding technology that enables a single human operator to monitor activities over a complex area using a distributed network of active video sensors. The goal is to automatically collect and disseminate real-time information from the battlefield to improve the situational awareness of commanders and staff. Other military and federal law enforcement applications include providing perimeter security for troops, monitoring peace treaties or refugee movements from unmanned air vehicles, providing security for embassies or airports, and staking out suspected drug or terrorist hide-outs by collecting time-stamped pictures of everyone entering and exiting the building. Automated video surveillance is an important research area in the commercial sector as well. Technology has reached a stage where mounting cameras to capture video imagery is cheap, but finding available human resources to sit and watch that imagery is expensive. Surveillance cameras are already prevalent in commercial establishments, with camera output being recorded to tapes that are either rewritten periodically or stored in video archives. After a crime occurs – a store is robbed or a car is stolen – investigators can go back after the fact to see what happened, but of course by then it is too late. What is needed is continuous 24-hour monitoring and analysis of video surveillance data to alert security officers to a burglary in p...
