Automatic Security, Surveillance System For Video Streams Being Developed To Combat Terrorism

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Aug, 2018 ) :An Automatic Security and Surveillance System for Video Streams is being developed to help provide great support to Law Enforcement Agencies in combating terrorism and capturing culprits.

The system will use surveillance cameras installed in security sensitive areas which will capture and store videos of daily life activities happening around in that area.

Ignite, formerly known as National ICT Research and Development Fund, Ministry of Information technology and Telecommunications is developing the System in collaboration with Al-Khwarizmi Institute of Computer Science, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore at a cost of Rs. 26.62 million.

When contacted official sources have said Principal Investigator (PI) of the project is Dr. Muhammad Usman Ghani Khan. The project is expected to be completed this year.

As per details, automatic understanding of the videos will be performed using image processing methods which would result in the development of several useful applications.

In addition, textual description of the video sequence will be generated using natural language processing which will save huge storage requirement. A web based utility for videos searching and summarization will also be provided to search most relevant videos in accordance with the security needs.

The sources said technically, this project mainly encompasses automatic understanding of visual scenes based on individual contents/High Level Features (HLFs) present in videos and added by extracting high-level features, such as human's face, age, gender, emotions, actions and objects, human-human interaction, human-object interaction, scene settings etc., the interpretation of a video stream can be easily obtained.

The peaceful purposes of this project are monitoring crowd, restricted access points and counting occurrence of specific persons.

The project will also provide substitutes for human monitoring of surveillance cameras. Such human monitoring can be compromised with drowsiness or over work scenarios; therefore, an automated solution is highly desirable since it would run all days and nights and on virtually any number of cameras without human intervention.

Currently, image processing community is focused on identification of individual objects, their properties and events in a video stream. This project extends this work to next level, the sources said and added it is a step ahead of keyword based tagging as it captures relations between key-words associated with videos, thus clarifying the context between them.

Initially, HLFs are identified from a video sequence and secondly, these HLFs are combined together using natural language processing techniques to generate smooth descriptions of a videos sequence.

Finally, this automatically generated language description is summarized to present most important contents in the provided video sequence.

Successful implementation of this project can lead to useful applications related to video searching, retrieval, mining and warehousing.

Given a textual description or a keyword, user of the system can search a video.

In this way, user can save his time while retrieving only desired events instead of watching whole video.

In addition, proposed research work open new horizons for statistical explanation of the video sequences, e.g. number of persons in video sequence, unusual events occurring in a complete day, counting humans with different age, gender, emotions and actions, list of common objects occurring in most of the videos etc.

These statistics will be helpful in taking precautionary measures for eradicating terrorism activities.

Finally, a web based searching and summarization tool will be generated for end users of this research work.

It merits mentioned here that from technological perspective, one tested technology that can provide some protection against terrorism is video surveillance. They are quite common these days, resulting in sharp rise in surveillance data during last few years.

This rate of increase has been gathering speed in underdeveloped and developed countries alike. Only in United Kingdom, there are 4.2 million closed circuit tv cameras installed, one per every 14 people.

This procedure is becoming common in Pakistan as well. For example CPO office Lahore has more than 100 surveillance cameras while Punjab institute of Cardiology has 80 cameras to monitor activities of patients and their relatives. A huge amount of data is collected by these cameras every day, but question remains how to make meaningful use of this data. It seems futile to store the whole day data especially if it was a serene day, or even if some suspicious activity was observed in some part of the day.

The storage mechanism should be intelligent enough to log only the most relevant coverage of the video stream. Even thenthe problem remains of storing huge amount of data which isexpensive with respect to storage media required.