The Open Cybernetics & Systemics Journal

2008, 2 : 219-229
Published online 2008 July 11. DOI: 10.2174/1874110X00802010219
Publisher ID: TOCSJ-2-219

Intelligent Visual Surveillance: Towards Cognitive Vision Systems

Dimitrios Makris , Tim Ellis and James Black
Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics, Kingston University, UK.

ABSTRACT

Automated visual surveillance systems are required to emulate the cognitive abilities of surveillance personnel, who are able to detect, recognise and assess the severity of suspicious, unusual and threatening behaviours. We describe the architecture of our surveillance system, emphasising some of its high-level cognitive capabilities. In particular, we present a methodology for automatically learning semantic labels of scene features and automatic detection of atypical events. We also describe a framework that supports learning of a wider range of semantics, using a motion attention mechanism and exploiting long-term consistencies in video data.